If a Tree Falls (9 page)

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.

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.

 

 

 

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.

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.

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

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.

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.