Nine

It sits on the center of Petra’s palm, looking more like a computer chip than the swirled snail of the hearing inner ear.

“The implant imitates the cochlea not in appearance but in function,” the doctor tells them.

He has the good looks of Spanish youth, reminding Suzanne of the tall, healthy musicians she played Carmen with one summer in Seville. They attacked the music, grinning with the schmaltz of it, taking her later for wine near the university that was once Carmen’s tobacco factory. “Tourist season,” they shrugged, and she felt happy. She was not a tourist but a musician leading an extraordinary life, a woman meeting her lover in Lisbon two days later.

The doctor’s smile does not seem disingenuous, but it is easy, offered without real thought. “It both will and won’t make her hear, depending on how you conceptualize hearing.”

Petra repeats her question: “Will she be able to hear?”

“The implanted electrodes introduce signals that are carried by the auditory nerve fibers to the brain, allowing sound to bypass the damaged portion of the ear. Is this hearing? Yes and no. The sound processor translates microphone signals into electrical stimuli. These elicit patterns of nerve activity that Adele’s brain will interpret as sound.”

“So the answer is no; she won’t hear.” Petra leans back in the armchair, folding her arms.

“More than ten percent of patients receiving the implant can communicate without any lip reading at all. They can converse with their eyes closed, you understand, talk on the phone. Most recipients can communicate fluently in spoken language when it’s combined with lip reading. Many can distinguish pitch. The numbers are only getting better.”

Petra shifts forward again. “But aren’t the outcomes much better in people who have lost their hearing? You know, who remember what speech sounds like and already know how to talk.”

“Of course.” The doctor still smiles. He is not talking about his child, and he speaks with energy and good cheer. “But we are having tremendous success with those who have been profoundly deaf from birth, provided—”

Petra laughs. “‘Profoundly deaf.’ That’s funny.”

“Provided that we implant close to the optimal age range and follow up with education and therapy. If we can implant Adele in the next six months—sooner is better, understand—I have every reason to believe that she will live a normal life in the hearing world.”

“‘A normal life.’” Petra laughs again. “Can you get one of those for me, too?”

The doctor smiles, aware that she is joking but not quite getting it.

“When do you need to know?” Petra asks.

“We can complete the presurgery therapy and schedule the procedure with about two months’ notice.”

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 passes 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 associate 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 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 canal. Deeper, past the secret passage 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 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 circumstance. 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. But she knows this is a false superstition. 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 bitch.”

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 buttons 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 ‘Frère 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 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 dispassionate. 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.