I was driven to hear everything I could for my mother
In the first year of her life, my mother could hear. She could hear her mother whispering words to her, her father arriving home from the office through the front door for dinner, the traffic from the Grand Concourse in the Bronx of the 1930s coming through the windows.
Then, just six days after her first birthday, my mother was stricken with spinal meningitis. She went into a hospital and almost died and came out deaf. She would never hear again.
She grew up hearing nothing, neither her parents, her teachers, her friends, her doctors, nor her own voice or the kids around the neighborhood who made fun of her behind her back, making faces and calling her deaf and dumb.
How must my mother have felt, at age 23, looking at me, her firstborn child, for the first time and knowing she would never hear me? Knowing she would never hear me cry as a baby in my crib or play my drums in the basement as a teenager or recite my haphtara at my bar mitzvah?
I, in turn — and no doubt in response — grew up hearing everything and then some. I must have sensed at the earliest possible moment, with acute awareness, that my mother was deaf, and I came of age especially sensitive to sound, my ears amplified.
All through my childhood, I vowed to hear for my mother. I listened closely to all the sounds surrounding me, the doo-wop music playing on my transistor radio, the splash of swimmers every summer at our municipal pool. It must have dawned on me that I was somehow responsible for making up for the hearing she lost in the hospital.
I secretly prayed that scientists would discover how to transfer hearing from me to my mother. If she had to go through her life hearing nothing, my logic went, I would go through mine hearing everything. I would hear the world on her behalf, acting as her proxy, her radar.
That’s how it’s gone my whole life. I’ve made it a point to hear everything that could be heard for 70 years. I’ve attempted to attune myself to all frequencies as if it mattered, as if it would make any difference — as if, by this commitment, I could perform magic and enable my mother to hear.
All through my childhood, I vowed to hear for my mother. I listened closely to all the sounds surrounding me, the doo-wop music playing on my transistor radio, the splash of swimmers every summer at our municipal pool.
Living in New York City for 46 years, I heard all the sounds expected in a city, the best and the worst. I heard the rumble of subways below, the thrum of planes above, the blare of car horns honking away on Queens Boulevard, the husbands and wives next door arguing with each other through our apartment walls.
Then, last July, I moved to Italy, to the countryside, and now I hear a different symphony. I hear the crow of roosters at daybreak, the chatter of magpies, the chug of tractors. I hear the spatter of rain on the leaves, the whoosh of winds gusting through our trees and making the branches dance. I hear the clop of horses on Sunday mornings, the jangle of bells that herald a herd of sheep and goats flocking past our house unannounced, the aria of Italian spoken all around.
If only my mother could hear all this, I still think. If only she could have heard Luciano Pavarotti sing, or the smack of a wooden bat against a baseball, or the thunder of Orson Welles declaiming Shakespeare, or the relentless surge of Niagara Falls. If only she could hear her 3-yearold great-granddaughter Lucia giggling or calling out to her. But her life had no soundtrack. She had to hear with her eyes.
Now and then, my mother would ask me how certain sounds sounded. I never, as a child, knew how to answer her. Today I might say sound is, like music, a language all its own, miraculous and untranslatable.
How many other hearing children of deaf adults do as I do, in a lifetime effort to balance the scales and listen for Mommy and Daddy? They must be legion.
We often hear, those of us lucky enough to hear. But we seldom listen, turning a deaf ear, just as we often see, those of us lucky enough to see, but seldom notice or truly observe, turning a blind eye.
I’m still trying to hear for my mother. I always will. She left me no choice. My job was to fill her silence.
My mother died more than two years ago, at age 91. Other than her deafness, she lived a largely lucky life: marriage, children, friends, a split-level in the suburbs, the whole package.
If heaven exists, I imagine my mother there now. Only her afterlife is different from her existence before. She can hear again. She can hear everything I can hear. She even hears me now.