If a Tree Falls by Jennifer Rosner Read Free Book Online Page B

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