Honora’s soft upper lip rose, vulnerably.
“Are you saying that modern medicine can’t do a damn for nerve deafness?” Joscelyn asked.
“I’m sorry, we can’t. But with consistent auditory training and appropriate amplification, that person can learn to develop certain listening skills.”
Lissie had been awake several minutes and was sucking her thumb. “It’s past her feeding time,” Joscelyn said, blinking furiously.
Dr. Weller showed them into a small room.
Lissie was changed and peering alertly at her plush bear when there was a tap on the door and a young woman came in. Thick red curls framed a face too bony and angular for prettiness: it was the intelligent eagerness of her expression that made her attractive. “What a beautiful little girl,” she said, bending her knees to Lissie’s level, smiling. “I’m Carole Donovan, the audiologist. We’re going to see Dr. Weller.”
Joscelyn clasped Lissie to her still oozing breasts. “Are you taking her away?”
“No, Mrs. Peck,” Carole reassured. “You and Mrs. Ivory’ll be with her in the testing room.”
Testing room?
Joscelyn’s thighs trembled and she held the baby with tight caution as she went down the short corridor. Dr. Weller sat in a booth like that of a recording studio, his plump fingers playing with knobs and dials that bristled from a console. A large glass window in front of him showed a small interior room.
“Here we go,” Carole said, opening the second door.
On this side, the control booth’s window was a mirror.
Large, triangular speakers stood in each corner and an oblong speaker descended from the acoustical board ceiling. Toys spilled from two large bins. Lissie, however, reached toward the table: a mechanical monkey held sticks poised over a drum.
“Not that one, Lissie, honey,” Carole said, again bending to the child’s level. She picked out a yellow rubber whale, squeaking it. “Each of the toys in here makes a different sound.”
The rubber fish squeaked again as Lissie thrust its tail into her mouth.
“What Dr. Weller’s going to do is play sounds on the various speakers. If Lissie reacts, we reward her by letting my monkey beat his drum.”
The speaker behind them gave a high, nearly inaudible whine. Then the rushing roar of surf was all around them. A horn honked stridently. A trumpet blared. Lissie didn’t react, the toy monkey remained immobile. The muscles of Joscelyn’s shoulders and back were strung so tightly that she worried the baby must sense it. “Here,” she said to Honora. “You hold her for a while.” Trucks passed through the cubicle, then jets, sirens wailed closer and louder, a jackhammer shuddered mightily. Honora’s oval face pulled into a grimacing wince.
Blessed silence.
“As you’ve noticed, we’re at the threshold of pain,” Carole said, pressing plugs into her ears. The bright eagerness was gone from her face. “Now you’ll pass it.”
A cannon blasted, then another. As the cannonade increased unendurably, Joscelyn’s eyes involuntarily squeezed shut. Forcing them open, she saw that Lissie, on Honora’s lap, had tilted her head fractionally as she continued to placidly mouth the whale.
Silence.
Dr. Weller wheezed as he stepped up into the room with them. His round white face was somber.
“Well?” Joscelyn demanded. “What did your stint at the console prove?”
“Mrs. Peck, we’ll talk later. For the next test Lissie must be sedated.”
“What are you going to do to her?”
“Nothing that hurts. For the brain stem we prefer the child still, that’s all.”
“Brain stem?” Joscelyn snatched Lissie from Honora’s arms.
“It’s nothing ominous,” soothed the doctor’s fine voice. “We’ll attach three electrodes to measure the brain stimulation, then use the bone oscillator, here.” He touched behind Lissie’s ear, and she gave her lovely toothless smile. “The brain stem test bypasses the middle ear, which we already know is impaired.”
“So at least you did figure out something?”
“Mrs. Peck, it’s nearly one. Why don’t you and Mrs. Ivory relax, have a bit of lunch? Come back in a couple of hours. Then we’ll talk.”
And Carole said, “There’s a pretty good sandwich counter downstairs in the building.”
They ordered an egg-and-pecan salad on whole wheat to split, but neither bit into her overfilled half. In less than fifteen minutes they were back in the Weller Clinic’s waiting room.
Two older children with hearing aids were reading, and a pretty teenager wrote in her looseleaf notebook. A little boy, maybe three, sat with his mother near the toy bin. Picking out a ball, he made a strange, high-pitched squeak.
The young mother beamed at him. “Yes, Billy, it’s a ball,” she said, enunciating carefully. “A big red ball.”
The child repeated the squeak. “Baa.”
Joscelyn’s bladder sent out an urgent signal, and she requested the key to the ladies’ room: it proved a false alarm. Honora, silent and pale, sat staring out at the opposite building. Joscelyn flipped through back issues of The New Yorker, not seeing the pages. By now her shoulders were so tensed that her neck ached as if from a major whiplash injury.
After an endless two hours the reception nurse told them Dr. Weller was ready.
Next to Dr. Weller’s neat desk stood a Portacrib; Lissie slept on her side, angelic, exquisite.
A tiny, middle-aged Oriental woman in a white coat got to her feet. She was dwarfed by Dr. Weller. “This is my chief associate,” he introduced. “Dr. Bornstein.”
The physician bent her smoothly coiffed, graying head.
“Mrs. Peck.” Dr. Weller was looking at Joscelyn, his big white face expressionless. “Our testing can’t be entirely accurate because Lissie is so young. However, as you doubtless noticed, she paid very little attention to the loudest sounds. In the low frequencies, two-fifty to five hundred hertz, she has a profound hearing impairment—ninety decibels. And in the high frequencies—a thousand to four thousand—she has no measurable hearing.
“Now say it in English.” Joscelyn’s voice shook.
“Dr. Bornstein and I concur that your daughter was born with extensive damage in the eighth cranial nerves—I explained earlier those are the receptor mechanisms of the hearing apparatus.”
“She has nerve deafness, then,” Honora whispered.
“I’m very sorry,” Dr. Weller said.
Suddenly it happened. The dark medical library, the prestigious windows, the diagrams of grotesquely outsize ears lurched and spun. Suite 2017 was toppling into Fifty-third Street, the blue couch sinking like a fast elevator, her stomach plummeting. Earthquake! My God, New York’s been hit by a ten on the Richter Scale. Earthquake. Into her mind swam the precautions every Californian learns: get away from windows, find a doorway with a strong supporting beam. But if the earth was heaving, why were the others calmly watching her as if expecting her to speak?
Honora blew her nose. “What can we do?”
“It’s not too soon to start training,” Dr. Weller said.
“Most major hospitals have a hearing center, with training and rehabilitation,” Dr. Bornstein added. “Mrs. Peck, in Los Angeles you have the John Tracy Clinic. They work with children from infancy to school age, educating the parents and offering them counseling—a hearing-impaired child strains family relationships.”
The room continued falling. Joscelyn could scarcely keep her grasp on the blue tweed pillows.
“Why do you keep acting as if she’s deaf?” inquired someone. The sound waves must not be vibrating properly, for the words were uttered at least a mile from this quaking, shaking office.
“I’m sorry,” Dr. Weller’s rotund form bounced like a huge ball. “News like this is difficult to accept, Mrs. Peck. But your daughter is a beautiful, intelligent child, and with the right training, patience, devotion and love, she’ll grow into a beautiful, intelligent woman.”
“She is not
deaf,” said the voice, yet farther away.
“When parents find out, they’re usually in shock.” Dr. Weller’s wondrous voice was rich with compassion.
“Here, Joss, you better lie down on the couch.”
“She is not . . .”
For the first time in her life, Joscelyn fainted.
* * *
Dr. Weller arranged for other opinions. The otolaryngological departments of Baby’s Hospital and Beth Israel concurred with his prognosis.
When the limousine left Beth Israel it was dark. Neither woman spoke. In the Waldorf Tower suite, Joscelyn bathed Lissie, crooning as she put her down in the hotel crib while Honora ordered from room service.
Joscelyn took her place opposite her sister in the full-sized dining room.
“Joss,” Honora said, “you’re leaving tomorrow morning, so tonight we really better make some plans.”
Joscelyn pushed at the mealy whiteness of her baked potato. “Doctors! They make me sick! At Berkeley the bright guys were never premed, just the grinds.”
“You can’t stay in Lalarhein.”
“One overweight jerk gives a diagnosis and the others fall in line, backing him up. That’s called professional courtesy.”
“You really ought to call Malcolm. You haven’t phoned him since we got here.”
“What’s there to say? That an assortment of New York weirdos don’t know their asses from hot rocks?”
“Lissie went to the best specialists,” Honora’s hands were trembling as they curved around her waterglass, yet she spoke with a faint trace of that English remoteness that commanded respect from everyone.
“That obese slob can’t be the best.”
“The point is that Lissie needs training, and so do you. She’s cut off from the normal ways of communicating, so you have to teach her other means—we’re lucky she’s so very quick—”
“Except in the hearing department. There she’s slow.”
“Malcolm can be transferred home.”
“Why?”
“Oh, Joss, you’ve never hidden from the truth.”
“Since when are you an expert on babies? I’ve read enough books, I’m a mother. Children develop at different speeds, you know.”
“Don’t talk to me like that.”
“How should I talk to you, when you keep insisting Lissie’s defective?”
“You’re not ten years old, Joss. The last thing Lissie needs is a mother who snipes at everyone and gives off hateful signals.”
“That two-ton quack and his cronies admitted they couldn’t be exact. I say Lissie simply hasn’t reached the stage where she can respond to their booming and banging and bone oscillating. In her own good time she’ll learn.”
“Never.” Honora’s eyes were shadowed and wet. She went around the table to put her arms around her sister’s shoulders. “Joss, you’ve got to accept Lissie’s deafness. Otherwise you won’t be able to help her.”
Joscelyn couldn’t take any more. Shrugging away from Honora’s embrace, she leaped up, overturning her chair. “Lissie is not deaf!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. “She is not deaf!”
* * *
When Joscelyn arrived at the Daralam airstrip, Francie Duchamp and Mary Curtiss were in the narrow slot assigned to waiting females, both of them waving their covered arms.
As they took the diaper bag, the car seat, the burdensome overnight bag, Joscelyn said quickly, “The kid’s fine. Not a thing wrong with her. I guess Malcolm and I were out of line, expecting her to be a genius all the way around. She’s just not very quick on the aural side.”
At home, she phoned the shack that was field headquarters for Pump Station 5.
Malcolm’s first words were: “How’s Lissie?”
Joscelyn’s throat seemed to close, and air could not get to her brain. She was hyperventilating.
“Joss? You still there?”
“She’s fine. I guess we were out of line, expected her to be a genius all the way around.” Joscelyn said, repeating by rote. “She’s just not very quick on the aural side.”
“That’s all? It’s developmental?”
“Yes,” Joscelyn gasped.
“Hey, and I’ve been too chicken to call and ask about my little sweetheart. Give her a big kiss and tell her Daddy misses her and loves her.”
Thursday night, makeup freshened, hair shampooed and blown-dry, Joscelyn hurled herself into her husband’s arms.
“Welcome home,” he said in a low sexy voice. “Welcome home, baby.” He kissed her as if they were lovers, not a married couple.
For a few more seconds she luxuriated in his embrace, then she blurted, “Darling, doctors are such dumb asses.”
His body tensed, and his arms fell away from her. “What does that mean?”
“The premeds never were the brightest, remember, just the ones who got the grades—”
“What the fuck did Weller say about Lissie?”
“Please don’t shout at me. I can’t explain properly when you’re this way.”
“You better get yourself straightened out, Joscelyn, I’m warning you. If there’s something the matter with my kid, the last thing I want to hear is your lies.”
“It’s complicated, Malcolm. They don’t know Lissie the way I do. They played with some electrodes and gave her this imbecilic unscientific noise test—I couldn’t even hear some of the sounds. With a baby this young they aren’t sure anyway. I’m the one who knows her, and I can see she’s perfectly fine. Sit down, let me fix you a drink—”
He thrust his boyishly handsome face pugnaciously toward her. “What the fuck did they tell you about my daughter?” He punched her upper arm.
It was a mean blow, and as she staggered back a step, the past week’s assortment of thin, fat, Jewish, Oriental, didactic and reticent specialists, the biting spells of vertigo, Honora’s dark, worried eyes, and Lissie—most of all, Lissie, peacefully sucking on a rubber toy while the last trump sounded—roiled up inside her like vomit.
“You want to know what’s wrong, I’ll give you what’s wrong!” Joscelyn shouted. “She’s deaf! Our beautiful, perfect daughter is profoundly deaf!” At this, her first self-admission of Lissie’s handicap, Joscelyn’s heart was banging against the walls of her chest like a wrecking ball. “She’s deaf. Three different sets of specialists said your daughter’s cold, stone deaf!”
Panting, she awaited physical retaliation. Malcolm bent his head and closed his eyes, standing in his sweat-stained work khakis with enforced stillness. She saw a tear squeeze from his right eye. Had he looked like this when bullied by that monster, his father?
“Darling, I’m sorry, so sorry . . .” She was crying, too. “I shouldn’t have yelled it out, but I hadn’t let myself believe it before. I’ve blocked it all the way. Oh God, and she’s so perfect otherwise.”
“It’s permanent?” He didn’t look up.
“The eighth cranial nerve is damaged in both ears. The doctors all said the same thing. No hearing in the high frequencies, practically none in the low. There isn’t any surgery to correct nerve damage. She’ll always be deaf.”
His sigh shook.
“The doctors said we ought to go home,” Joscelyn said. “The sooner she starts her education, the better. And we both have to learn how to help her.”
He wiped his eyes with a grubby knuckle. “There’s no deafness in my family,” he said in a pleading tone.
“Nor in ours. I feel such a failure.”
She reached out to him. They clung together, swaying back and forth in their shared, accepted grief that the child born from the tangling of their imperfect lives was flawed, too.
* * *
A few minutes later, after Malcolm had bathed, both Urquharts came over with Double U’s inevitable welcome home to Lalarhein, a tuna noodle casserole. Joscelyn, putting Lissie down, could hear their conversation.
“Nothing’s really bad with the kid,” Malcolm said. “But she does have a hearing problem that needs a littl
e minor correction, so it’s my guess she and Joscelyn will ship home soon. If it were anything major I’d go with them like a shot, but since nothing’s vital, I’ll stick it out until the pump station’s finished. Besides, there’s the groundwork I’m doing with Khalid, you know, on the big airport project Ivory’s hoping to sew up.” Malcolm’s voice lowered casually, as it always did when he insinuated he was in the epicenter of big doings, a trick of his performed so ingenuously that most people took his self-aggrandizing hints at face value. “I’ll hang in here.”
There hadn’t been time for them to plan their departure, but Joscelyn had never considered it would not be en famille. The air conditioner came on with a blast, and she could not hear them anymore, but she was realizing with a jarring misery that their daughter’s handicap was even more unbearable to Malcolm than it was to her.
He’s going to try to ignore it, Joscelyn thought. He’s going to lie to himself and everybody else; he’s going to act as if her deafness doesn’t exist. She continued to smile down at Lissie, but her hands shook as she tucked the yellow sheet around the baby and her favorite giraffe.
Four
1966
Crystal
34
In Taormina, that final week in December of 1966 was like summer.
Crystal, in a white bikini, lay on her back by the pool. Pads called mouse bras covered her eyes. One knee bent, arms at her sides, she shimmered with a cream concocted specifically for her by a Zurich dermatologist who had taken into account the Sicilian latitude when he charted the maximum number of minutes she should expose herself to full sun. No skin-corrugating mahogany tan for Crystal Talbott, but the palest of ambers to honor her fair pigmentation, blond hair and blue eyes.
The pool was a hundred vertical feet from the tile-roofed villa, a polished blue fingernail on the landscaped finger of the little isthmus that jutted out from the cliff halfway to the sea. Steep ledges carved in Roman times led from the house to the pool and thence down to the dock; however, modern inhabitants preferred the glass-enclosed elevator that clung to the rock.
Too Much Too Soon Page 25
