If a Tree Falls Read online

  I needed these ancestors. I needed them for guidance. I needed them for company. I needed them for escape.

  In my writing, my own anxieties and hopes entwined with those whose existences I couldn’t flesh out in the light of day. My ancestors were becoming real to me, if only in my mind, and I latched onto them.

  Galicia, 1871

  CAUTIOUSLY AT FIRST, joy sneaks its way past the evil eye, into the house. Nellie’s baby-charms—her curled pink toes, her shock of black hair—soften even the deep furrows in Moshe’s brow. And such eyes! Dark and penetrating.

  In time, Pearl will brag that Nellie sees like an eagle. Nearly two, she can find every last button Pearl hides in a hide and seek game. But so stubborn, and she refuses to obey! “Look at her,” Pearl scoffs, as Nellie scooches her way across the threshold and out toward the chicken coop, even as Pearl and now Moshe call to her to stop.

  Pearl can feel Nellie’s eyes searching her face when she picks her up roughly from among the chickens and pulls bits of straw from her hair. “You must come when we call out to you. Who can run a house this way?” Pearl plops Nellie down on her bed, the room dim and shadowy grey, then walks out.

  A minute later, she comes back. Nellie is fingering the damask bedspread and she startles at Pearl’s appearance, every muscle tensed like a spooked animal. Pearl turns to look over her shoulder. What on earth is the matter? She grabs up Nellie and holds her to her cheek.

  At night beneath that same damask spread, Pearl lies awake, staring at the ceiling. She knows—has known for months—that something is wrong with her child. Nearly two years old, and Nellie doesn’t speak yet. Well, she might be a late bloomer with that. But the expression on Nellie’s face earlier today, so surprised and confused when Pearl reappeared in the bedroom . . . as if she hadn’t heard Pearl coming, hadn’t heard her calls, hadn’t heard her chidings, or later, her consoling words.

  All the next day Pearl wanders about in a fog, consumed with her worries about Nellie. How could she have failed to notice? Nellie spends her days scanning the house for clues of activity, laying her palms and occasionally even her broad cheek flat on the floor with the approach of footsteps. Now Pearl calls out for Nellie from behind. No head turn. Now she clangs two pans together. Nothing. No.

  When Moshe walks in at sundown with four unexpected guests for Shabbat dinner, Pearl is beside herself. Must the mitzvah of hospitality be theirs to make, tonight of all nights? Pearl wants to excuse herself from the packed living room and somehow prepare Nellie for the crowd. But Moshe is already calling for Nellie in a voice louder than usual. He is walking room to room, pounding on the walls as he walks. Pearl wonders who these guests are, why Moshe is making such a show. He smells of the rabbi’s chamber.

  Pearl backs out of the room and rushes down the hall past Moshe. She finds Nellie at her bedroom window, a dollop of lantern light shining on the rag doll in her hand. Pearl hoists Nellie up and gestures that it is time to eat. Moshe stands in her path, as she scurries toward the kitchen.

  “What is the matter with that child?”

  “We’ll talk later, after dinner.”

  “No. I want to talk now.”

  “Moshe, we have guests standing around the table.”

  Later, when Moshe runs his finger along the base of Pearl’s neck as she tidies up after dinner, she jerks away. She turns to look into his face, and for a moment she flashes with what power she has, to withhold herself, to withhold her news. Moshe pales, suddenly. “What is it, Pearl? You glow and you glower at the same time.”

  “Nellie is a good girl. She is not disobedient. Not on purpose.”

  “She is disobedient. She doesn’t listen.”

  “She doesn’t hear, Moshe. She can’t hear.”

  “What are you talking about? Of course she hears.”

  “No, Moshe.”

  “She meets me at the door almost every afternoon when I come home. How does she know I am coming if she can’t hear?”

  “She feels it in the ground. I’m telling you, she doesn’t hear.”

  In the rabbi’s study, lines of thought are pushed and pulled, twisted and turned. Voices rise and fall. Eyes are rubbed; beards are tugged. Questions are always answered with other questions.

  If it can be said that any of the men in the rabbi’s study are practical, the practical one among them—Chaim—stands up and looks at the others.

  “Can she be married?” he asks, his eyebrows arched high.

  “She’s two years old,” says Yaacov the candlemaker, with a dismissive wave of his blistered hands. “You’re asking, can she be married?”

  “I’m asking, yes, because Pearl and Moshe are worried. They want to know: what kind of life can she expect to live? Can she be married, have a family?”

  “Why not, if a match was to be accepted?” Yitzchak the trader offers.

  “Well,” inserts Shmuele, the scholar, “the Mishnah makes distinctions: there are the deaf who cannot speak, cannot reason intellectually or morally; and the deaf who can. If she is the former, she will be forever like a child.”

  “Moshe says she hasn’t spoken a word yet,” Chaim mutters, as if only to himself.

  “But there is a chance, no? that she will recover,” Yitzchak puts in. “She is only two years old, and for her age, she watches intently. Besides, she needn’t become an orator, just to become a bride.”

  A deaf baby girl in their midst. The scholars and sages of Tasse are unsure of what to think. To abide by the ancient texts, Pearl and Moshe’s baby might as well be a corpse. A cheresh, deaf and mute, lacks cognition, the basis of a person’s status. Luckily, some in the room, including the rabbi himself, have traveled to Budapest and witnessed deaf people conversing with their hands. If the deaf can talk with their hands, maybe they have some thoughts in their heads.

  An argument can be built, no? In any case, it needn’t be so strong. Nellie is a girl, sweet and pretty. How many thoughts does she need? And if she doesn’t talk so much, well, when it comes to marrying, a man might consider himself lucky.

  Pearl sits on the bench outside, shifting, then re-shifting her weight, shaking out her legs. Her belly is enormous already, and the mole on her neck is bigger, darker. Moshe paces back and forth, back and forth, brushing away a low tree branch that tangles his hair with each pass.

  When the door of the rabbi’s house opens, it is declared that Nellie can honor her community with mitzvoth the same as any other girl. Pearl heaves a sigh of relief, and stands to take Moshe’s hand. But Moshe’s hand is limp; his eyes don’t meet hers. Moshe can sense the retreat of the men. As they file out of the rabbi’s front door, their downcast eyes ooze the permanent liquid of pity.

  It is different with the women. In time, the women open up to Pearl with stories—a deaf cousin in London, a deaf niece in Vienna. They bring news of schools in London, Berlin, and Budapest run exclusively for the deaf. They bounce Nellie on their knees, exaggerated expressions on their faces. And the women come to crowd around Pearl in her newest labor, to stand strong as she leans and groans and squats, to wring out towels with clean water.

  But when Pearl holds her second daughter in her arms, and recognizes in her new baby’s eyes the already-focused stare of eagles, she asks the women to please leave her, to go, to go.

  Pearl looks into the living room. Moshe is sitting with a book. His face is disgruntled and his fingers are wound tight with the white fringes that stick out beneath his shirt. Nellie is standing at the crib, peering through the slatted rails. She is studying her baby sister, asleep with her legs bent like a frog’s, her arms stretched straight above her head. Pearl goes to Nellie. She points to the baby, and struggles to explain that she cannot hear. Moshe grouses loudly from his reading chair—“you don’t know that”—but Pearl is certain. She knows the scanning eyes, the searching fingertips, the flattening palms against the floor. She points to Nellie’s ears, then to Bayla’s, and shakes her head “no.”

  Moshe rustles himself out of t
he living room chair and shuts himself off in his study. Pearl counts to herself. Five months since Bayla’s birth, and Moshe still hasn’t come to her in the night. Not that she’s so eager. These nights, she does the extra baking once Nellie and Bayla finally sleep. Her hair, damp from the mikva, she wraps up into a tight knot under her marriage wig. Why should she advertise her monthly cycles, marked out by her trips to the bath house? God knows she is trying to be a good wife, a good mother. So, why? She begs God to tell her, why this curse of daughters who cannot hear?

  At the market, in the upstairs galley of the shul, at the river to collect water, Pearl watches other mothers with their children, and she knows it is different for them. They sing to their young ones in breathy whispers, in octave-leaping coos. They invent stories, and the children’s eyes grow wide. A calf in an imaginary flower-drenched meadow takes its first wobbly steps. A silvery fish breaks through a lake’s shimmering surface to speak in magical tongues. A ball of yarn mysteriously appears in an old peddler’s basket. Stories Nellie and Bayla will never hear.

  Pearl falters in fits and starts, in a confused pantomime, trying to understand and meet her little girls’ most immediate needs and desires. Bayla cries and Pearl offers her more to eat, hands her a doll to play with, and then sees—oh!—her little finger is red and swollen, it must have gotten pinched in the slats of the crib.

  Nellie’s hungry eyes devour everything in their sight. Yet, Pearl can see that the patterns of days and weeks do not compose a familiar rhythm for Nellie. Routine events—the frenzied buying on market day, the lighting of the braided Havdalah candle—come as a surprise, a new enchantment to Nellie week after week after week. Pearl’s fears mingle, then, with the thrill of her girl’s endless, childlike wonder. At least with Bayla’s arrival, Nellie no longer sits alone, hours on end, in the nook beneath her bedroom windowsill. She rushes about the house and cares for Bayla. She helps Pearl bathe her. She strokes her fuzzy scalp. She fusses over her clothes. Pearl watches from the kitchen as Nellie gently rocks Bayla in her crib, its wooden rails suspended from strong ropes that run from the ceiling. Nellie gestures and points, makes faces and whole body movements. Her face is alight, like a well-lit house on a dark night.

  Massachusetts, May 2001

  SOPHIA WAS TEN MONTHS OLD when we arrived in Northampton. Light flooded into our house through the huge, wavy glass windowpanes. Bill and I arranged for modest home renovations: we had the busy wallpaper removed and each room painted in a deep, historic color.

  In the spirit of my superstitious forebears, I hung a chamsa, a “protecting hand,” from the iron doorknob in our front entryway. Sophia ran her little fingers over the glistening hand, molded in shiny copper and bejeweled in brilliant turquoise, the “eye” in the center meant to ward off evil. Despite our modernity, the strategy of averting trouble through an ancient stare down still held its appeal.

  Jan came to our house from the Clarke School the first week, and every week from then on. She brought huge tote bags filled with toys and visual props to accompany songs to sing and books to read: itsy bitsy spiders and water-spouts, five little monkeys and doctors and beds, a plastic Humpty Dumpty egg, a stuffed toy rat and a sack of malt, and the house that Jack built.

  Together with Jan, we sat on the floor of our living room and engaged in “auditory-play therapy” with Sophia. We set up a toy car on a track, and as it ran we said “go!” We tucked a doll into a miniature bed, then nudged it and called out, “ Wake up, baby!”

  Jan taught us to narrate everything we were doing, and to take extra care to prepare Sophia for what was happening with both visual and auditory cues. Before a car ride we were to bring our keys to Sophia, show them to her, and jangle them near her ear. Before a bath, we were to carry Sophia to the tub, show her the running water, and let her hear it. It might be typical for all babies, especially those who nap often, to expect the unexpected, or else to be beset by confusion: they fall asleep, they wake up in the supermarket; they fall back asleep, they wake up in Florida in Grandma’s living room. But deaf children are at risk for confusion even when they are awake because they miss the auditory cues that tell hearing children what will happen next. A dog’s bark + heavy footsteps down the hall + a deep voice trailing in = Daddy’s home. Without the anticipatory sounds, Daddy appears as if from thin air.

  Multiple times each day, Sophia pulled out her hearing aids. She’d reach behind her ears, yank the aids off, and throw them across the room or drop them into her bowl of oatmeal or plunge them into her mouth. Jan was insistent that the aids be returned to Sophia’s ears immediately after the necessary clean up.

  We had other concerns by now, too, one that even overshadowed the hearing loss. Sophia’s weight was low—so low that doctors labeled her with the term “failure to thrive.” She had never eaten a lot, and even the move to solid foods hadn’t boosted her weight. At birth she had been in the fiftieth percentile, and now she was below the first. Specialists urged us to consider feeding Sophia with tubes—a nasalgastric tube run down her nose, or a G-tube surgically inserted into her stomach. We resisted such invasive measures, and tried fattening her up the old fashioned way. We put cream into everything we served her, trying to make each bite as calorie-rich as possible. We ate at busy restaurants to keep her distracted as we nudged morsels of muffin, bites of ziti, or spoonfuls of vanilla ice cream into her mouth. We bought every high-calorie food we could think of to entice her to eat. Maple butter, tapioca pudding, strawberry cheesecake. Once I prevailed upon a baker to sell me a container full of cannoli filling. Most of our “hearing lessons” had baking and eating components. All of us but Sophia grew fatter—Bill and I ate cheesecake in middle-of-the-night fits of stress, and Lucca gobbled up every last bit that fell uneaten from Sophia’s high chair.

  Early on, Jan recommended that we create picture books for Sophia: “where” books and “who” books to provide Sophia with visual narratives of our days. For a week, I kept a camera in the car and snapped pictures to document our routines. The following Saturday, I sat at our kitchen table, spooning strained peaches (and cream) into Sophia’s mouth and squash soup into mine. An orange meal for both of us. Then I set out the developed pictures, back from the camera shop, and began to organize them before placing them in transparent pouches. Sophia at the pediatrician’s office; Sophia in the audiology booth; Sophia in a lesson with Jan. As I considered what order to put them in, I was overcome by a sudden revulsion, a desire to throw them all out. Where was Sophia at the playground, Sophia at the children’s library, Sophia at a friend’s house? The only pictures unrelated to Sophia’s therapies were pictures of the restaurants and supermarkets we frequented. I flashed with anger, first at our circumstances, then at myself. Why had I let Sophia’s young life become narrowed in this way? Why hadn’t I rounded out her therapy schedule and medical appointments with diversions, playdates, fun outings?

  The next morning I took pictures of the public library, a nearby park, and a playground. Over the next few days, we photographed children Sophia was becoming friendly with. Ben, with a big smile on his face and a flower-puppet in his hand. Katie, with a colorful dress-up scarf billowing like a wizard’s cape around her shoulders. Julia, gnawing on a gigantic ear of corn. Bill took a picture of Sophia and me whooshing down a slide. We dug out photographs of our extended family and family friends. I put them all in Sophia’s albums, vowing to plan (and to narrate) richer, fuller days with Sophia.

  From Northampton, we were two hours away from my parents in Connecticut. Every three or four weeks, we would drive down to see them or they would come up to spend the afternoon with us. My mother devised fattening recipes for me to try on Sophia, using ricotta cheese and mascarpone. My father collected newspaper clippings, sometimes about deafness or low weight, sometimes about a philosopher or a psychologist whose work I might find interesting. I was glad to be nearer to my parents—I wanted a steady connection with them as much as ever.

  When Bill traveled for work, I w
ould stay over at my parents’ with Sophia. Early on, I would watch apprehensively as my parents interacted with Sophia, fearful that Sophia’s wide open gaze would go unmet as my parents’ attentions turned to other things—dressing, reading a day’s newspaper, preparing a too-extravagant meal. I would stand by, ready to catch Sophia’s felled gaze in mine. To my relief, my parents played with Sophia attentively. Both my father and my mother doted on her, but my mother communed with Sophia. Calm and focused, she gave Sophia her full attention—attention I had experienced, cherished, only in fleeting, intermittent intervals as a child.

  With Sophia in her lap, my mother compared their hearing aids. She favored Sophia’s soft, rubbery, colorful earmolds to her own hard, plastic, white ones. Once she noticed a red patch where Sophia’s hearing aid had rubbed a raw spot behind her ear. Hurriedly, my mother brought out the baby oil and gently soothed Sophia’s skin there. I watched them bond, eyes locked. Deafness shared. My mother combed Sophia’s hair, tickled her cheeks. She made a high-calorie rice pudding, and Sophia ate it all up.

  As we went about our daily lives in Northampton, we didn’t meet many deaf people. Our hearing lessons with Jan took place in our house, to support our listening practices at home. Bill and I made contact with some Clarke School parents, but there were no other deaf babies at Clarke then with whom to form a playgroup for Sophia. Most often, the hearing-impaired people we met were octogenarians rattling shopping carts slowly down the aisles of the supermarket. Sophia always noticed and pointed to their hearing aids, even the small beige ones that fit snugly inside their ears.