Burning River

After Voices

After voices, after the sun,
after the last dunning edges
of the moon have been removed,
what will be left of sound?
Bastard syllables, the work of
insects on wires and houses,
the balm of everyday existence
from the radio, the citrus fields
fanning their smudge pots, the thaws
and the frosts that are the rancher’s
unwanted suspense, the balance
of rust in brake pads and wheels.
In the language of immigrants,
in the kitchens on High Holy Days,
in the decrees of Old Country gets,
who will recreate the colors of
arguments? Pewter and quicksilver
gray, a fog laid down as if to confuse
the investment. By a bomb, by a bell,
my father’s hearing was cut off in
mid-sentence, at mid-century so he
was left speculating on the worth of
a trainload of oranges, or a bushel
of good intentions. This is how he
lost everything, his mind cooing itself
to sleep against a gentle static. As if speech
was a solar flare breaking the skin
of a star, and he answers back with the
frustration of silence.

In 2003, my father was diagnosed with throat cancer. His diagnosis was not that unusual, given his age and the fact that he spent a good deal of my lifetime smoking cigars. He also managed to recover much as the doctors predicted, probably due to the current state of cancer treatment. But the arc of his illness was anything but average. It began with the loss of his voice, which for both of us was traumatic. For my father is extraordinarily dependent on his voice, and it is a voice to behold.

His is not just the voice that meted out the punishments of my childhood, but one that forecloses any possibility of a private telephone conversation, whether it is penetrating my cell phone on a busy New York City sidewalk or my landline in my apartment on a Saturday morning. My father’s voice isn’t just loud, but voluminous, plunging through a room with all the aplomb of a rock hurled toward a window. He yells when he’s upset over the latest Republican-sponsored malfeasance, and he yells when he asks after his granddaughter and waxes affectionate. In conversational battle, opponents eventually choose surrender, so that my father may carry on with his monologue. My father’s voice is how he makes a way in the world, forging a swath so vast and so deep that no other force could possibly navigate through it.

My father is probably loud because he is deaf. Some deaf people are supposedly loud so they might hear themselves. My father speaks at the highest possible decibel to ensure that he is the only one who can be heard. I don’t know how large a proportion his deafness plays in his strategy, just as I have never been certain as to the nature and cause of his hearing loss. He once told me that as a teenager he fiddled with an explosive device meant to alert railroad workers to oncoming trains. When it went off, he went deaf. He also once told me that this story was nonsense. As a child I was advised to speak softly and clearly because my father couldn’t hear my piercing staccato. Now he struggles to hold a conversation with his high-pitched granddaughter, who is scared off by his mixture of rage and enthusiasm.

What is beyond dispute is that he has a habit of immediately apologizing to anyone he meets that he is “hard of hearing;” it has been his salutation of choice since before he married my mother fifty years ago. He was attracted to her, he explained during one dissection of his failed marriage, because she had the only voice that could tear through the bells and whistles which otherwise preoccupy his eardrums. After my parents’ divorce, his hearing did not necessarily worsen, but his impatience with it did. He was through not only with my mother’s interests in musicals and the stage, but most other relationships he might need to remain a decent member of civilization. He eventually dated another woman on and off; she did not look my mother, but she shared her cosmopolitan background and cool tone of modulation. He outlived her, his voice carrying him through, as it has through decades of spurning hearing aids, cochlear implants, sign language and quite possibly whatever he retained of the lip reading courses my mother had him take when I was a child.

Overall, for a deaf man in denial he did fairly well in the hearing world, bulldozing his way through most of his interpersonal contacts. He finished college, briefly taught public school, attended graduate school in education and various Real Estate courses, occasionally volunteered on political campaigns, started and shuttered a few businesses, and ran the wholesale produce operation he inherited from his father.  My mother was drafted into the role of translator on his annual business trips, but I know he missed some of the ambient nuances about him. I can cite one such instance, which occurred while we watched Woody Allen’s “Manhattan” together. One scene revolved around a joke about the elusive female orgasm. As the audience pitched into a fit of laughter, my father turned to me for an explanation. I was seventeen, and promised my mother could explain it so much better.

He insisted he was unconcerned when he first contracted a case of laryngitis one winter; he would only admit to bemusement when it would not relent. I was seriously frightened by his gurgle and whisper, as agonizing to listen to as it must have been for him to produce.  He maintained he felt great. But three months into this condition, he confessed sensing the extra effort his lungs and diaphragm had to make to get any sound beyond whatever was bulging in his throat. The gerontologist responded by prescribing glorified antacids (usually used for acid reflux; my father has suffered from a stomach ulcer since I was two-years-old) and a strategy the medical community calls “watchful waiting.” I call it healthcare rationing. By the time the diagnosis of cancer was made, six months into his case, his best option was said to be the removal of his voice box. The destruction of his voice would be completed.

These developments set off what can most honestly be described as a wave of hysteria on my part, heightened by my father’s nonchalant, or in my opinion, bad attitude about everything. No, he did not want any nursing services or social workers contacted. Under no circumstances was I to visit. Any discussion of his getting email, a telephone answering machine, or a TTY or TDD device (a Text Telephone or Telecommunications Device for the Deaf, which are also used by the speech impaired) was forbidden. Then we argued over who would administer whatever protocol he would so graciously consent to undergo, how it would be paid for, and whether he would even be treated at all. For someone who could barely speak, he mounted a valiant effort through telephone conversations at frustrating the little rationality I was able to launch against him. For many weeks, my aim was lousy.

For reasons I am not able to accurately report now-one year on top of the five-year remission he earned, five years being the longest remission most cancer treatments will promise–he finally submitted himself to surgery to remove the tumor, chemotherapy, and radiation. There were many debates, accusations, harangues, grievances, and recriminations aired during this period, all to no satisfactory resolution-unless you count his recovery. He emerged from his retinue of torture late that summer so much thinner that he no longer required insulin for his diabetes. One ear, he claims, was completely drained of all hearing. His voice, however, returned to him with the same vigor, with more remembrances of FDR, recitations of famous movie scripts, and more opinions than it had ever before compiled.

Perhaps because he was raised in the era before television, or because he is, despite his protests, so acutely aware of his impairment, my father has been particularly attuned to voices. His deafness made him an expert on their diction, enunciation and pacing: who had it right and why (because he could hear them); and who could not even fake it. Few could match the performers of his childhood, whom he actually heard without interference, although he was willing to concede some British actors were eminently hearable. But listening to those he called mumblers, like Brando, De Niro, and James Dean (all known as American Masters on the only T.V. channel he watches religiously, public television), is for him a trial with Kafkaesque significance. After Paul Robeson-a radio hero from his childhood-died in 1976, my father took to a nightly deconstruction of Robeson’s aural achievements in “Old Man River” and “Ballad for Americans.” Out of nostalgia, my mother tolerated this, but my sister, an aspiring musician, was mortified down to her auditory nerve. Just imagine a deaf man with no musical education beyond watching MGM musicals forty years earlier trying to imitate the luxurious and learned vibrato of a preternaturally gifted singer. His performances have not necessarily improved with age, or so others maintain, although I have made peace with these episodes of subjugation.

Yet this rejection of his circumstances must have passed something onto me, something that I was not truly conscious of until my father’s voice was mauled. The disappearance of the bulk of his voice had me paying closer attention to the details I was ignoring all around me: lavishly rolled consonants from bi- and trilingual speakers, and the length and strength of vowels; nasal importations from Southern dialects, meaty inflections from the Northeast, and the clear margins between syllables that scat singers relish, but too many of us rarely invest a second thought. Losing my father’s voice prompted me to re-learn these seeds of language, the stuff that comes before words. Mortality, cancer, and all of its metaphors have long been inspiring subject matter for writers; the potential loss of a parent, combined with my father’s paradoxical relationship with sound itself, provided more than fertile ground for me. They finally gave me a subject, a focus for my speculations. But the form in which this subject was delivered required special attention be paid to the origins of human sound. Like many I had experimented with poetry. But it was an extravagance, something I would dip my fingers into for a taste of what was too rich, too expertly and tightly wound, in large measures. With my father’s illness, poetry became a necessity; for these thoughts, indeed, the only appropriate form.

The former national poet laureate, Donald Hall, has been quoted saying that poetry is the most efficient use of the language. It would be beyond grandiose for me to claim such an efficacy for these poems. They are intuitive, if not desperate attempts to preserve a time and a place seemingly confronted with extinction when my father’s voice was threatened.  There are other inspirations here, naturally, but they all share a connection to the romance and imagination wrought by my father’s voice. For now, I want to celebrate these thoughts and fables, the sounds from which they are constructed, and images they are meant to summon. If a curmudgeon is someone who looks at the gift of long life as though it were some higher being’s revenge, my father snugly fits this definition. Still his next protracted silence, I know, is likely to be far more enduring than any he has known.  Before that begins, I would rather commemorate what he has given me, ungainly and glorious, with the hope that it might last beyond him, beyond all of us who can listen.

~Jane Rosenberg LaForge