An Unfinished Score Part 6

Petra stands, her posture erect but awkward, one hip stuck out too far, like the marionette of an unskilled puppeteer. "I'll call you in four months if I decide to do it."

The doctor's smile is gone. "Your daughter really is an excellent candidate. Think about what her life will be like without speech. It will limit who her friends are, who she can marry, what kinds of work she can have. She's such a smart little girl, so lovely and sweet."

"I think about that all the time. Can you really think that I don't think about that all the time?" Petra pulls on Suzanne's hand, her voice calming some but still loud when she says, "You need to get me out of here."

"Wait," says the doctor. He writes a room number on a piece of paper. "Go back out front, cross the courtyard, and enter the other wing. Some of the therapists are in with a group of children. Go see what they're doing before you close your mind."

The doctor has misread Petra. Petra is impulsive, but her impulses are complex, and she often clings to an idea most tightly right before she throws it down. Every time she decides to quit drinking for a stretch, she begins with a bender. If she's arguing with the doctor against the implant, it's because she's leaning toward the surgery.

"Poor little irony," Petra says when they reach the hedge-lined courtyard.

A couple pa.s.ses them, and Suzanne's legs shake under her weight. She avoids eye contact; she does not want to see people who are visiting terminally ill children. Perhaps, she hopes, Adele's deafness works like a charm, protecting her from early sickness and death, her ante already in the pot, her dues already paid.

Suzanne nods to a bench. It is important that Petra calm down before they see the therapist and children. Suzanne is sympathetic, knowing that Petra may hear what she hears all the time: "How ironic: you're a musician and your daughter is deaf."

Because everyone knows a bit of Beethoven's story and because so many rock musicians have lost their hearing to earphones and amplifiers, people a.s.sociate deafness and music, even if they label it as irony. Some suspect, even, that the mind's ear hears more perfectly than the actual ear. There's the story about Schubert: he claimed the piano was more distraction than help in composing. Someone with perfect pitch needs only pencil and paper to write music.

"The Beethoven effect," Suzanne says.

"What people forget," Petra launches a speech she has given before, "is that hearing loss was more common in Beethoven's day-as likely to strike a musical genius as anyone else but not more more likely. They forget that or else they want to overlook it because they think it's romantic. Even you, even you think it's romantic that she's deaf." likely. They forget that or else they want to overlook it because they think it's romantic. Even you, even you think it's romantic that she's deaf."

Suzanne exhales. "That's not fair, Petra."

Suzanne often argues that Beethoven composed his best stuff late in life not because of his hearing loss but despite it, building on decades of work and study and thought. It is that way with most composers, at least those who aren't stunted prodigies. Beethoven hated being deaf, railed against it. He wanted to hear his Ninth Symphony not just in his mind but with his ears.

Petra wraps herself with her arms and rocks back and forth intensely. "I know what," she says. "You decide. You're so good at deciding everything-you decide. I'm leaving it up to you."

Suzanne feels her anger rise as heat into her face, the tops of her ears growing warm. She tries hard, all the time, to help Petra as much as possible without ever tricking herself that she is a parent, that Adele is hers, that she has the right to decide anything important. Especially in this she has kept a studious distance, even when it wasn't easy, trying not to even have an opinion. Yes, she's gathered information and listened, but she never allows herself, even for a moment, to forget that Petra is Adele's mother and she is not.

Before Petra's frantic phone call when she realized that Adele could not hear, Suzanne had not given much thought to the ear. When musicians speak of the ear, they mean little more than the ability to identify or produce pitch, tempo, and dynamic. Like everyone else, they complain that their ears are too large or too small, that they stick out or lie strangely flat; as teenagers, they pierce them thoughtlessly. Rarely do they contemplate the ear as their most fundamental organ, their talent, tool of their trade.

Petra's call was followed by others as the doctors, including specialists Petra could not afford, debated the type and cause of Adele's deafness. From a helpless distance, Suzanne looked at drawings of the ear. She learned the beautiful names of its parts. Visible to the eye are the helix, the antihelical fold, the tragus dipping over the external auditory ca.n.a.l. Deeper, past the secret pa.s.sage of the tympanic membrane, through the drum, sit like atolls the malleus, the incus, and the stapes. So gorgeous and intricate is the ear that it is miraculous that anyone hears at all. For most of those who do not, she learned, it is not that the ear shuts to sound but that, for various reasons and reasons that often remain unknown, the deaf person does not translate the acoustic energy of sound into the electrical signals carried to the brain by the thirty thousand fibers of the auditory nerve. That is the nature of Adele's deafness, and no doctor could explain why except to say that the four parallel rows of hair cells in each of her ears were incomplete or had deteriorated. A tiny imperfection with profound consequences.

"Could it be something she took?" Ben once asked.

Suzanne yelled back at him that no, Petra had not cost her daughter her hearing. "She took nothing, drank nothing, breathed nothing noxious. She avoided cats and people who coughed. She washed her hands." By the time she said hands hands she was crying. Suzanne knew, even as she was doing it, that she was defending not Petra but herself. Surely Ben had noticed his mother and sister commenting about her exercising while she was pregnant, about what she ate, about the half cup of morning coffee. "Everyone wants to blame the mother," she finished, but Ben was already walking away, his response to almost every fight, his response to most of her strong emotions. she was crying. Suzanne knew, even as she was doing it, that she was defending not Petra but herself. Surely Ben had noticed his mother and sister commenting about her exercising while she was pregnant, about what she ate, about the half cup of morning coffee. "Everyone wants to blame the mother," she finished, but Ben was already walking away, his response to almost every fight, his response to most of her strong emotions.

Sometimes after talking to Petra Suzanne dreamed of riding a raft through the turns of the ear. She asked every musician she knew whether they knew that the basilar membrane running the height of the cochlea distributes vibrational energy longitudinally and by frequency. Only one person she asked had known this before she told him, and that was Ben. Ben was the only musician she talked to who had thought seriously about hearing, considered the ear in composing. At Curtis he composed a piece that alternated the lowest frequencies that cause the most vibration at the apex of the cochlea and those very high frequencies that cause the most vibration at the cochlea's base. He called the series of movements "Ear Dances." Just before they moved to Princeton, Suzanne dug through every box in their garage, but she could not find the composition.

"We're talking about Petra, not you," Ben said when she asked him if he knew where it was. "Don't turn into one of those women who go daffy on their dogs when they don't have a baby."

"Adele is not a dog," she said, but as is common with the most cutting of remarks, she not only hated him for its cruelty but believed in its accuracy.

Suzanne sometimes thinks that if Ben had not said that single sentence she would have forgiven everything else, endured the emotional distance that was there from the beginning, stayed more or less happily married, resisted Alex's gaze. Other times she thinks the two events are unrelated, that she couldn't have refused Alex even if she had been happy, that she would have fallen in love with him in any circ.u.mstance. Nothing breaks cleanly. Sometimes she thinks her marriage ended the day she met Alex, but it's also true that her marriage never ended but goes on and on, that she is married still.

And now she hopes that her loss-her mother, her child, her lover-protects her from more loss, the way she hopes Adele's deafness protects her from premature illness. Dues already paid Dues already paid. But she knows this is a false superst.i.tion. Everyone who reads the news knows that life can take everything from you. Some people lose one child in a flood or famine; others loose all six plus everyone else they've ever known. Luck doesn't spread evenly, not good luck and not bad.

"Petra?" she says. "What's the name of that composer for recorder? Seventeenth century?"

Petra smiles. "Oh, yeah, from that awful tutorial."

"Remember, he grew rich as a bell tuner? He traveled everywhere because he had a special feel for them, for that shape."

"The bell whisperer," Petra laughs. "So, okay, let's go see the kids and the bells. And yes, I know I'm a b.i.t.c.h."

Suzanne puts her arm around her friend's square shoulders. "You're scared."

"I am scared." Petra still smiles but also swipes her eyes. "But let's do this. I want to see."

Inside the other wing of the children's hospital they follow the information boards and signs to the fourth floor, then down a gleaming hallway that does not smell like hospitals usually smell but instead has the neutral odor of an office building.

The door they seek is open, and they stand wedged together in its threshold, watching a small circle of children made blind with plush black eye covers. They respond with push b.u.t.tons to chimes played by a woman in a lab coat. The children range in age from maybe three to nearly adolescent. When they remove their blindfolds, the woman turns. She's in her forties, blond and elegant with stern features calmed by an ample smile. She smoothes her already sleek hair with her hand and then extends that hand to Petra, saying her name as a question.

The children zip backpacks, collect belongings, make their way to the door in pairs and small groups as Suzanne and Petra stand aside for them. Some say good-bye to Dr. Ormand; of these, some sound almost like hearing children while others speak with the exaggerated roundness of the deaf, of those who have learned to speak by shape and not by sound, who have learned to speak with other people's fingers on their mouths. One boy, about Adele's size, walks alone. He is humming, carrying the simple tune well, and grinning.

Suzanne nods. "Can they hear the chimes?"

The doctor motions them into the room, and they sit at the table where the children were being tested. "I'll have to tabulate their answers to tell you about this group today, but the answer is yes. Pretty much. They can perceive the sounds. It takes work and therapy-a lot of it-but within a few months of implantation all of these children could correctly identify whether a chime is sounded or not. Most of them can accurately identify differences in volume, if those differences are substantial. They can't distinguish differences as subtle as those described by the Weber-Fechner or Powers Law, but they can distinguish loud from soft."

"Blindfolded?" Suzanne asks, for Petra.

The doctor nods. "And most have some control over pitch. Again, they may not be able to discern an A from an A sharp in the same octave, but if you play two notes an octave apart, or even considerably closer, almost all of them can tell which is higher."

"But what's it like?" Petra asks. "What's it like for them? Is it like hearing?"

Dr. Ormand shrugs. "I don't know. I was born hearing. There are some good books, memoirs that I can recommend, but I'm not sure we can ever understand. What I do understand is that these children will have a more normal life than they would have if they hadn't been implanted."

"What's normal?" Petra asks, sounding again like Ben.

The doctor smiles-a professional gesture more than a genuine response. "There's a philosophy department over at Temple."

"That one boy," Suzanne says, "he was humming 'Frere Jacques.'"

"Again, it takes a lot of therapy and follow-through, not just here but in the home and school, to train the children how to interpret the signals their brains are receiving. But yes, some of them can perceive music and even sing well. That's likely determined by innate talent underlying the deafness."

Suzanne asks, "Is it really music to them?"

The doctor shrugs. "There's probably a music theory department at Temple, too."

Suzanne does not know how to phrase her question more usefully, to explain that it's a real question and not, like Petra's, just an expression of stubbornness.

"There's work being done in Canada that suggests that maybe ten percent of music can be experienced through the skin, even in people who can't hear at all. The researchers there designed a special chair that allows the deaf to have an experience of music. Not your experience but an an experience. Add an implant, and yes, I would call it hearing music." experience. Add an implant, and yes, I would call it hearing music."

When they stand to leave, the doctor hands Petra what they have come for: a thick stack of pages containing findings that suggest that Adele, if implanted, could talk on the telephone. That she could-more or less and depending on definition-hear.

"On the other hand, I should warn you. In your home country, in Sweden, where good candidates are implanted early and are not allowed to sign in schools, plenty of kids yank out their earpieces as soon as they get home and use sign language. I've read your daughter's evaluation carefully. She's just a little older than I'd like, but otherwise she's as good a candidate as they come. But the cochlear is not a panacea. It's a big decision."

"I want her to hear me play violin," Petra whispers. "Is that selfish? When I found out she was deaf, that's what I hated the most. All the music I played for her while she was inside me-she didn't hear any of it." She is crying now. "I want her to be able to do anything, whatever she wants, to be happy."

The doctor's face is still-not unsympathetic but dispa.s.sionate. Suzanne recognizes the expression from the doctor who told her that her baby would die inside her, handing her a box of tissue but not laying a hand on her shoulder. Dr. Ormand has heard these things before, and it isn't her job to make parents feel better.

As they walk back down the hall, Suzanne finds that it now smells exactly like a hospital and quickens her pace.

Ten.

Suzanne drops off Petra downtown and steers south, where her Irish father lives stubbornly among Italians despite the fact that the last Italian willing to give him the time of day divorced him with cause two decades ago. She lets herself into his building and then into his third-floor flat.

He sits in the crooked frame of his window, exposing only a fraction of his profile. At this angle, though, his hand is larger than life. And Suzanne cannot forget that it is this hand that her mother saved her from, rousting her from sleep only days before her ninth Christmas, whispering close to her ear, "Quietly, quickly; come, Suzanne." Her mother's lips brushed her ear, and her face smelled clean, like mint. After that night, any time Suzanne spent with her father was counted in hours and not in days, and she understood that this was for the best.

Now his hand has stilled and the many serrated edges of his tricky personality have dulled. Years of heavy drinking have bored holes through his intelligence. As his brain's nerves and synapses seek pa.s.sage around these empty plugs to form a coherent story of the world, he revises the past and sees in the present mostly conspiracy and threat, whether from a new wrinkle in the tax code or the transport truck that bears toward his fender as he drives thirty miles per hour on the freeway.

She cannot bear to visit more than a few times a year. Ben never offers to come with her-and she never asks him to-so she always comes alone, with food prepared in a foil ca.s.serole pan.

Her mother, after they left that night, became a producer of frozen ca.s.seroles. She worked long days all week, in an office during the day and in the evening trying to sell houses in a sliding city, in a city whose residents had yet to discover that they wanted, after all, to live in town. So on the weekends her mother cooked for the week, freezing meals in foil pans for Suzanne to thaw and heat on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. As she grew older, Suzanne offered to help, to cook on weeknights. "No," her mother would say, "your time is for practice." When her mother died, she left a freezer full of neatly stacked dinners.

Eventually Suzanne ate this posthumous food, not out of nostalgia or tribute but because she was broke and needed to eat. The final meal was an improvised ratatouille stirred with noodles, made from an eggplant gone bitter, so the last taste of her mother was disappointment. Suzanne fell apart crying, wis.h.i.+ng she had saved the delicious spinach lasagna or cacciatore for last.

"What are you looking at?" She starts to add the word Dad Dad to the end of her question, but the consonant sticks on her tongue, and the question ends with a small thud. to the end of her question, but the consonant sticks on her tongue, and the question ends with a small thud.

"The garbage men. All they do is stand there and smoke. Company's owned by the brother of the guy who owns the building. It's a racket. My rent money goes to them so they can stand around and puff their Marlboros when all I can afford is generic. One of these days I'm going to do something about it."

Suzanne nods, but her father's attention stays trained through the window.

"One of these days I'm going to write a letter to someone. Maybe the newspaper, or that television station. Someone ought to investigate this racket. Maybe I'll get a pet.i.tion going around the building."

"I just came to look in on you." Suzanne crosses the small efficiency unit and puts the lasagna in the half-sized refrigerator. "I have a friend waiting for me, so I can't stay."

"I suppose you'll want me to wash that pan after I eat."

"No," she says, and when he looks at her, she musters a smile. She says what she says every time: "It's the kind of thing you can throw away if you don't want to keep it."

"I know you mean well, but that's the problem with this country. Everyone thinks you can just throw things away. Pans, paper, marriages, babies."

She feels a twitch in her ribs. "Well, you can wash and keep the pan if you want, and maybe you'll like what's in it. I grew the basil-no cellophane bags involved."

She waits, but her father sees only the workers who have caught his ire.

"I'll see you next time," she says. "Take care of yourself."

Alex often asked her why she would drive to Philadelphia and back when she could have Chinese food or pizza delivered to her father with a phone call. Yet he understood, as much as anyone could, that her relations.h.i.+p to her childhood is more complicated than that.

Her car is parked to the left, past the garbage collectors, but she turns right to circle the block rather than cross her father's field of vision and earn a role in one of the myriad small conspiracies against him. Though she strides, neck tall and straight, she feels like a teenager disappearing around the corner to sneak a cigarette. Or an adulterous wife walking an extra block, hoping her lover will call her cell phone like he said he would.

Over her the sky is mostly the same concrete gray as the buckling sidewalk, though sun glows through the connective tissue between cirrus clouds, making their edges glint like metal. She can hear from above the sound of knives sc.r.a.ped against a honing stone and is terrified that she doesn't know whether the sharp sweeping noises come from an upstairs apartment or from the hot-steely sky itself, an auditory announcement of impending cosmic retribution.

An Asian woman trundles three children wearing summer s.h.i.+rts through the narrow door to a vegetable market. She makes brief eye contact with Suzanne but does not smile. Suzanne quickens her steps, anxious to be sealed into her car, its roof between her and the sky, the vent blowing cool air through the dashboard and the radio pus.h.i.+ng out any music at all.

Eleven.

Pop songs from the 1960s crackle from the car speakers as Suzanne zigzags northeast on mostly one-way streets, toward the restaurant where she'll meet Petra. She touches the hospital literature that Petra left on the pa.s.senger seat. The cover page is a medical ill.u.s.tration of aural anatomy. As always, it looks so much like a seash.e.l.l that Suzanne is tempted to ascribe pattern not just to the universe but to her own life.

On that first day in Charleston, after Ben's mother and sister finished their stylized interrogation over cuc.u.mber-and-cream-cheese sandwiches and too-sweet iced tea, his brother, Charlie, took her to Folly Beach. Ben declined the invitation, choosing to stay behind to read theory for an upcoming exam.

At the beach Charlie taught Suzanne to ride a wave with her body. Over and over she swam out, the salt.w.a.ter and sunscreen stinging, her eyes nearly closed. Over and over she stretched herself long, catching wave after wave, at once thrilled by and afraid of the water's lift and slam. Joyously tired, the way the beach would always leave her, she soaked in suns.h.i.+ne, waiting for Charlie to come in from surfing the farthest break line. She felt his shadow over her before she saw or heard him. When she sat up, he placed two sh.e.l.ls in her palm.

"It's funny, isn't it? The one that looks like an ear makes no sound."

He held the other one, a large conch, to the side of her head, and she heard the false sea in one ear and the real ocean with the other. They sat together after that, listening to the waves, the squawking gulls.

After a while, he said, "You sure you want to marry into this family?"

"I want to marry Ben." Suzanne had never said it aloud before, perhaps had not even thought it. But as she said the words, she heard them as truth.

"h.e.l.l, he's so hot, so do I!" Charlie laughed, but then his face settled into something serious, an expression Suzanne couldn't read. "Does Ben ever talk about our father?"

Suzanne touched Charlie's forearm, briefly, and shook her head. "Just a very little. A childhood memory or two. And that he drowned during a storm."

"Out there somewhere." Charlie stretched his arm toward the blurred horizon, where the pale sky met the darker ocean. "It's kind of weird, don't you think, that my mother keeps a picture of the boat on the mantel? There are other pictures of him, where he's not standing in front of the boat he died on, but that's the one we all have to look at."

"I'm sorry" was all Suzanne could think to say, and she held the conch back to her ear as she studied the translucently thin sh.e.l.l in her palm, noting its imperfections, that it was chipped in two places.

She wedges the car into a tight parallel s.p.a.ce on South Street and walks the few blocks to the Afghan restaurant where she will meet Petra, the restaurant where Alex asked her about her two most crucial choices in life: instrument and husband.

The establishment is small and made smaller by dark red decor: walls, carpet, chair cus.h.i.+ons, tablecloths all versions of the same hue. Lining the foyer are teapots, samovars, rice pots, long-handled spoons, daggers, an antique machete-objects of cooking and objects of war-together with framed reviews as well as articles about how violence in Afghanistan goes on and on. Last time she was here, Suzanne asked Alex if it was wise of the place to a.s.sociate death with its cuisine. "It's fine," he said, "because people want to be told what they already think. If the restaurant displayed pages of Afghan poetry or pictures of Afghan children watching television, people wouldn't come back. Food and blood aren't a problem. They're what people expect."

It is late for lunch but early for dinner, and Suzanne has the place to herself while she waits. She points to a table near the window, and the old man who seats her and will probably also cook her food leaves her with a menu that she does not study. She plans to order the precise meal she ordered the last time she was here. She cannot remember what Alex ordered, which feels like a crus.h.i.+ng loss. If she can't remember every detail, perhaps it is less painful to remember nothing.

What she does remember is their conversation, nearly perfectly. The place was more than half full that day, mostly with a workday lunch crowd, including someone celebrating a birthday at a table of six. Someone hummed the birthday song and, in a spontaneous coming together, everyone in the restaurant sang. This struck her as funny, and she laughed until she contracted the giggles.

While she stifled her laughter, Alex asked her, cold, "Why did you marry your husband?"

She felt her mirth drain and somberness cross her, shadowlike. She thought about his question-how she might answer it-for what felt like too long.

"There were several reasons," she told him finally, "including how serious he was about music. Really committed and really talented. I thought we would have this life of music, even that we would be at the center of something, though I guess there hasn't been anything to be the center of for a long time. Not like eighteenth-century Vienna, nineteenth-century Paris." She paused before striking a more embarra.s.sing truth. "I also thought he would take care of me. He was confident and from a stable family with some money. Old Charleston. And he seemed like he was going somewhere, that he could make me safe and take care of our children. You know how I grew up."

Alex nodded, simple understanding.