If a Tree Falls Read online

  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.

  Toting Sophia in her infant seat, we toured the Clarke preschool. The classroom was cheery and bright, and the children were playing—really playing. They had a make-believe lemon tree and a lemonade stand. They were squeezing, tasting, puckering, sugaring, stirring, pouring. They were buying and selling. They were talking!

  “You want lemonade?”

  “Yes. Ooh. That sour.”

  “Want sugar?”

  “Yes! I pour it myself. Here my money.”

  We observed the preschool for over an hour. From within the observation booth, we listened in with headphones to the wondrous sound of deaf children talking! Some more advanced than others; some in need of intense prompting. But all of them talking, and all of them playing. Afterward, we drove around Northampton’s neighborhoods with a real estate booklet. We gawked at turn-of-the-century houses that we could actually afford, then ate decent Tandoori at an Indian restaurant while Sophia slept in her infant seat under our table.

  We returned to the Clarke School to meet with Jan, the director of the parent-infant program I had spoken to by phone. Jan had a light in her eyes even brighter than the fuschia hair ribbon she wore to dazzle her young charges. She greeted us warmly and spoke with enthusiasm about child development, parental bonding, and play. She led us through the school, founded in the 1860s, before even Nellie was born. Jan, herself, had worked at Clarke for almost thirty years.

  By now Sophia was wide awake. We settled ourselves on the floor in Jan’s office and played with Sophia as we had grown accustomed. We sounded off toys by rattling maracas, squeaking a rubber cat, or pressing a fuzzy duck for its quack, then made a big show by widening our eyes, pointing to our ears, and proclaiming “I hear it” in response to each sound. Jan watched us for a long while. Eventually, she spoke up:

  “Sophia is going to be fine, no matter what school or what communication method you choose. You may decide to come here. But you needn’t move all the way from California. Sophia is alert and engaged. Above all, you are connected—you are an intact family.”

  I felt my body relax into the floor as Jan spoke. Her words loosened the muscles that had knotted in my guts, and I breathed deeply for the first time in three months. Jan had worked with deaf children and their families her entire professional life. Child development was her life’s passion. She said Sophia was going to be fine.

  On the plane ride back to California, Bill told me he had decided not to apply for the commissioner position. Sophia was the priority now. We talked about moving to Northampton. We agreed that if we were in the right place to raise Sophia, the other facets of our liv
es would work out. The Clarke School, and Northampton, felt promising to both of us. We decided to launch job searches in western Massachusetts, and when at least one of us found sustainable employment, we’d move.

  When we arrived home from the Northampton trip, one of the messages waiting on our voicemail system was from my cousin Valerie. I dialed her back before we had lugged the last of our bags into the entryway. Bill shot me an annoyed look. I motioned to Sophia, fast asleep in her infant car seat, a justification for returning the phone call now rather than later.

  “Jennifer, I think I found a death record for Judith Fleischer.”

  I was struck, silent.

  “Jennifer, are you there?” Valerie asked.

  “Are you sure it’s our Judith Fleischer?” I sputtered.

  I hadn’t known until that moment how desperately I had hoped to meet her, possibly my one remaining deaf ascendant. How I had placed my hopes for understanding my family’s deaf past—and for navigating my family’s future—on the stories I believed she alone could tell me.

  That night, I sat at my desk and tried to finish writing a philosophy paper that I had started before Sophia was born. For over an hour, while Bill and Sophia slept, I stared at my computer screen and tried to make sense of my now incomprehensible academic writing. I rifled through reference books and related philosophy articles. I turned arguments over and over in my head. It was no use.

  I reached for a new novel, one I had bought the same day as I’d bought the blank journal. The River Midnight, by Lilian Nattel, about life in an imaginary shtetl called Blaszka. Part of my new research program.

  “Time grows short at the end of a century, like winter days when night falls too soon. In the dusk, angels and demons walk. Who knows who they are? Or which is which. But there they are, sneaking their gifts into the crevices of change ...”

  I moved myself to the living room couch and spread a fleecy blanket on top of me. In no time, I was lost in the jabber of the market square, the heat of the tavern, the swallows of mushroom soup that kept December’s early chill at bay.

  Bill and I started our job searches. I bypassed the official, academic job market and instead had my dossier sent to the five colleges in the vicinity of Northampton—Smith, Mount Holyoke, Hampshire, Amherst, and UMass Amherst. During Sophia’s nap time, I typed up cover letters, trying to sound engaged and committed to my scholarly work.

  Surrounding me on all sides, our floor-to-ceiling bookshelves held tome after mighty tome of the great Western philosophers. In graduate school, I revered these books. I believed that they spoke to me. But now, they were silent. Just theoretical musings for minds detached from the reality of new babies, of my baby. Some were worse than silent: disparaging of the languageless deaf, deemed incapable of thought.

  When I had started graduate work, I had fixed on the riddles that went to my core: the metaphysics of nothing, the empty set—did it not swell, like a wet cardboard box, full with its emptiness? And skepticism, the question of whether you can ever know another mind, or be known by another? If the holes, generations-deep, wouldn’t fill, I could at least stare them down into abstractions.

  Bishop Berkeley’s phrase: esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived) had brought me to my knees. Not because of an enchantment with idealism. It stirred me like poetry, ratifying my sense of a tenuous existence, of having grown up largely unperceived. Esse est percipi. It transported me back to my mother’s bathroom countertop, my little-girl thighs sticking to the cold yellow tile. Rows of wicker baskets brimming with compacts, lipsticks, curling pins. The smell of hairspray. I watched my mother lean into the mirror, rail thin and powdery, her frantic eyes chasing after a vanishing girl. Looking too long. Longing.

  “Mom?”

  Her mascara-coated eyelashes made short black streaks on the glass.

  If my mother saw me, it was through her reflection, her projection. I was fractured, as if by a prism, or a multi-fold mirror, and the parts of me that failed to match her self-image were cut away from view, unseen. I tried my best to become like her, to garner the light of her gaze, with dress, with song.

  When I first started taking voice lessons in New York City, my mother sometimes accompanied me. We’d order the French onion soup at O’Neals’ Balloon. Then we’d stroll along the Lincoln Center streets, and I’d sing to her.

  “Ah fors’e lui che l’anima”—my favorite aria from La Traviata, it often felt like my best chance for connection with my mother. From the time I was fifteen until the time I left for college, my singing of its lines—“A quell l’a mor, quell l’a mor ch’e palpito, del l’universo, del l’universo intero”—could render my mother focused and attentive, her eyes huge, her lips quivering. Her heart unburied.

  The last lines, the song’s climax, became my deepest regret. My mother’s attentions would flicker, and I would again be prone to the intermittencies, the inconsistencies, that marked my childhood and destabilized me. My prized creations—a lopsided pot of colored clay, a woven lanyard bracelet, pages of schoolwork marked “excellent”—celebrated, then discarded in the trash. A birthday one year filled with fanfare, the next, nearly forgotten. A question, unanswered. Unheard.

  As I left home for college—I went to Columbia, planning to continue with my voice lessons on Sixty-sixth Street—I wavered uncertainly, a chalk mark on the verge of being erased. Along with singing, philosophy became my way to cast myself, to hurtle myself into the world. What are the elements essential for identity, for personhood, for perception and existence? If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

  I met Bill in the law library on a damp April evening during my junior year. He was a first year law student. We talked and talked—first in the library, then at a pub, then on Columbia’s main steps—Bill’s eyes holding me securely in his gaze all the while. When we parted that night at the huge iron doorway to my building, I loved him already. His eyelids crinkled around his soft blue eyes and his cheeks dimpled when he smiled at me through the grated window. My belly fluttered as I weaved up the six flights of stairs to my dorm room, and fell, joyously, into sleep.

  That summer, swimming together in a lake, Bill lifted me up with his strong forearms and swished me around, weightless. We made up silly rhymes about New York Mets baseball players—Jesse Orosco, Dwight Goodin, Gary Carter—and I sang him snippets of songs from The Fantasticks in between dives that I took from off his broad shoulders. Toweled and warmed by the sun, we sat with our legs still dangling in the water and passed a container of coffee ice cream back and forth. Bill’s tee shirt smelled like the corn plant that flowered in his apartment, and I nestled my face into his shoulder. When he swept me up in a hug, I could hardly breathe for the strength he brought, his arms braced tight around me.

  Over the next twelve years, we’d move to northern California, I’d pursue my PhD, we’d marry, have a baby. Bill’s steady eyes held me, even now. But I quivered still. To be is to be perceived. I questioned whether I had presence enough for him, for Sophia.

  We landed east coast jobs. Bill was hired to work in a children’s law clinic in Hartford, Connecticut, a forty-five minute drive from Northampton. His position had teaching and supervision components at an affiliated law school. I was hired to teach half-time in Mount Holyoke’s philosophy department: Introduction to Philosophy and whatever I wanted for an upper level seminar. I began devising a seminar called Complexities of the Self about how we can be divided, deceived, and opaque even to ourselves. I’d been interested, since my dissertation days, in the relevant philosophical topics—weakness of will, wishful thinking, self-deception. And now there was my own burgeoning obsession dividing me between the present and the past, between memory and invention.

  I was consumed with my deaf ancestry. With little hope of uncovering detailed information through family stories or genealogical research, I now found myself inventing scenarios, conjuring imaginary tales about my great-great aunts. Thinking of Nellie and Bayla,
I wondered: was I somehow inoculating myself to my worst fears for Sophia? Was I vying for control over others’ fates, even if not our own? Was I simply diverting my attention, a break from the stressors of life? Whatever the reason, thinking of them comforted me somehow. Quieted me.

  Bill and I searched the Northampton housing market via the web. We found a one hundred-year-old house just a few blocks away from the Clarke School. I pictured us in that neighborhood, pushing Sophia in her stroller beneath a canopy of huge maple trees, Lucca bounding by our sides.

  I flew out to see the house. It had wavy glass windows and thick detailed moldings, a fireplace and beautiful wood floors. In winter, we could snuggle with Sophia in front of the fire, reading board books and playing games. We could introduce her to snow—we didn’t get any in the Bay area. We could teach her to sled and skate, to ski and build snow-men. In fall, we could gather red, orange, and yellow leaves, and iron them between sheets of wax paper. And we could stroll through the Smith College gardens in spring and summer, set out picnics at Paradise Pond. Except for the busy wallpaper and wall-to-wall carpet in every bedroom, it was perfect. Bill said he trusted my judgment, so we bid on the house and bought it, for him sight-unseen.

  I had packed my journal for the trip. I’d been writing in it most nights. Whole story lines about Pearl and her daughters—story lines that always ended with strings, wrist to wrist. Then a baby’s cry, a soft tug-tug on the line, and a mother awakening to her child.

  On the flight back to California, I pulled the journal from my handbag, slowly unwinding the string that held its pages closed tight. Despite all my search efforts, I had just the two Census Reports of 1910 and 1930 showing Nellie in Brooklyn, first on State Street, and later on Union Street with her daughter, Bertha. And I had the army registration forms for her sons, Manny and Leo. I still had nothing on Bayla, nothing on Pearl or Moshe. I had no sense of how my ancestors really fared day to day, how they lived in deafness amidst the other challenges of the times.