"The Story of Edgar Sawtelle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wroblewski David)

Signs

WHAT WAS THERE TO DO WITH SUCH AN INFANT CHILD BUT worry over him? Gar and Trudy worried that he would never have a voice. His doctors worried that he didn’t cough. And Almondine simply worried whenever the boy was out of her sight, though he never was for long.

Quickly enough they discovered that no one understood a case like Edgar’s. Such children existed only in textbooks, and even those were different in a thousand particulars from this baby, whose lips worked when he wanted to nurse, whose hands paddled the air when his parents diapered him, who smelled faintly like fresh flour and tasted like the sea, who slept in their arms and woke and compared in puzzlement their faces with the ether of some distant world, silent in contentment and silent in distress.

The doctors shone their lights into him and made their guesses. But who lived with him morning and evening? Who set their alarm to check him by moonlight? Who snuck in each morning to find a wide-eyed grub peering up from the crib, skin translucent as onion paper? The doctors made their guesses, but every day Trudy and Gar saw proof of normalcy and strangeness and drew their own conclusions. And all infants need the same simple things, pup or child, squalling or mute. They clung to that certainty: for a while, at least, it didn’t matter what in him was special and what ordinary. He was alive. What mattered was that he opened his eyes every single morning. Compared to that, silence was nothing.

BY SEPTEMBER, TRUDY HAD had enough of waiting rooms and charts and tests, not to mention the expense and time away from the kennel. All summer she’d told herself to wait, that any day her baby would begin to cry and jabber like other children. Yet the question seemed increasingly dire. Some nights she could hardly sleep for wondering. And if medical science couldn’t supply an answer, there might be other ways to know. One evening she told Gar they needed formula and she bundled up Edgar and put him in the truck and drove to Popcorn Corners. The leaves on the trees were every shade of red and yellow, and crinkled brown discards covered the dirt of Town Line Road, swirling in the vortex of the pickup as it passed along.

She parked in front of the rickety old grocery and sat looking at the neon OPEN sign glowing orange in the front window. The interior of the place was brightly lit but vacant save for a gray-haired old woman, cranelike, countenance ancient, sitting behind the counter. Ida Paine, the proprietor. Inside, a radio played quietly. A fiddle melody was just audible over the rustle of leaves in the night breeze. Trudy had brought the truck to a halt directly before the big plate glass window fronting the store, and Ida Paine had to know Trudy was out there, but the old woman sat like a fixture, her hands folded in her lap, a cigarette burning somewhere out of sight. If Trudy hadn’t been afraid someone would come along, she might have waited a very long time in the truck, but she took a breath and tucked Edgar into her arms and walked into the store. Then she didn’t know quite what to do. When she realized that the radio had stopped playing, she temporarily lost the ability to speak. Ida Paine looked at her from her perch. She wore oversize glasses that magnified her eyes, and behind the lenses those eyes blinked and blinked again. Trudy looked at Edgar, cradled in her arms, and decided that coming in had been a bad idea. She was turning to leave when Ida Paine broke the silence.

“Let me see,” she said.

Ida didn’t hold out her hands or come around the counter, nor was there a grandmotherly note in her voice. If anything her tone was incurious and weary, though benign. Trudy stepped forward and laid Edgar on the counter between them, where the wooden surface was worn velvety from an eternity’s caress of tin cans and pickle jars. When she let go, Edgar bicycled his legs and grasped the air as if it were made of some elastic matter none of them could feel. Ida leaned forward and examined him with dilated eyes. Two gray streams of cigarette smoke whistled from her nostrils. Then she lifted one blue-veined hand and extended a pinkie that reminded Trudy of nothing so much as the plucked wingtip of a chicken and she poked the flesh of Edgar’s thigh. His eyes widened. Tears welled in them. From his mouth came the faintest huff.

Trudy had watched a dozen doctors prod her son, feeling hardly a tremor, but this she couldn’t bear. She reached forward, meaning to reclaim her baby.

“Wait,” Ida said. She bent lower and tipped her head and pressed that avian pinkie into the infant’s palm. His tiny fingers spasmed closed around it. Ida Paine stood like that for what seemed hours. Trudy stopped breathing entirely. Then she let out a gasp and scooped Edgar into her arms and stepped back from the counter.

Outside, at the four-way stop, a pair of headlights appeared. Neither Trudy nor Ida moved. The neon OPEN sign darkened and an instant later the ceiling fluorescents winked out. In the dark Trudy could make out Ida’s crone’s silhouette and her hand raised before her, considering her pinkie. The headlights resolved into a station wagon and the station wagon rolled into the dirt parking lot and paused and accelerated back onto the blacktop.

“No,” Ida Paine grunted, with some finality.

“Not ever?”

“He can use his hands.”

By then the whine of car tires had faded into the night. Orange worms of plasma began to flux and crawl in the tubes of the OPEN sign. Overhead, the ballasts hummed and the fluorescents flickered and lit. Trudy waited for some elaboration from Ida, but understood soon enough that she stood in the presence of a terse oracle indeed.

“That it?” was all the more Ida Paine had to say. “Anything else?”

A MONTH LATER A WOMAN came to visit. Trudy was in the kitchen fixing a late lunch while Gar tended a newly whelped litter in the kennel. When the knock came, Trudy walked to the porch, where a stout woman waited, dressed in a flowered skirt and a white blouse, her steel gray hair done up in a tightly wound permanent. She gripped her handbag and looked over her shoulder at the kennel dogs raising the alarm.

“Hello,” the woman said with an uncertain smile. “I’m afraid you’re going to think this very inappropriate. Your dogs certainly do.” She smoothed down the front of her skirt. “My name is Louisa Wilkes,” she continued, “and I-well, the fact is, I don’t exactly know why I’m here.”

Trudy asked her to come inside, if she didn’t mind Almondine. She didn’t mind dogs at all, Louisa Wilkes said. Not in ones and twos. Mrs. Wilkes settled on the couch and Almondine curled up in front of the bassinet where Edgar slept. Something about the prim way she walked and folded her hands when she sat made Trudy think she was a southerner, though she had no accent Trudy could detect.

“What can I do for you?” Trudy said.

“Well, as I said, I’m not sure. I’m here visiting my nephew and his wife-John and Eleanor Wilkes?”

“Oh yes, of course.” Trudy said. She had thought the name Wilkes sounded familiar, but hadn’t been able to place it. “We see Eleanor in town once in a while. She and John look after one of our dogs.”

“Yes, that was very the first thing I noticed, your dogs. Their Ben is a wonderful animal. Very bright eyes,” she said, looking at Almondine, “like this one. Same way of peering at you, too. In any case, I talked them into lending me their car for the morning so I could see the countryside. I know it’s odd, but I like the quiet of a car when I’m alone in it. A ways back I found myself at a little store, practically in the middle of nowhere. I’d hoped they sold sandwiches, but they didn’t. I bought some crackers instead, and a soda. The store is run by the strangest woman.”

“You must be talking about Popcorn Corners,” Trudy said. “That’s Ida Paine’s store. Ida can be a little spooky.”

“So I discovered. After I paid the woman she told me I wanted to follow the highway a bit farther and take this side road and look for the dogs. It was strange. I hadn’t asked for directions. And that’s the way she put it, too: not that I should, or could, but that I wanted to. She said it through the window screen as I was walking to my car. I asked her what she meant but she just sat there. I intended to turn back the way I came, but then I was curious. I found the road just where she said it would be. When I saw your dogs, I-” She broke off. “Well, that’s all there is to tell. I parked on the road and now here I am, feeling loony for having walked in.”

Louisa Wilkes looked around the living room, fidgeting with her purse. “But I do have the feeling we should talk some more. You’re a new mother,” she said. She walked to the bassinet and Trudy joined her.

“His name is Edgar.”

The baby was wide awake. He scrunched his eyebrows at the unhappy sight of a woman not his mother leaning over him and he stretched his mouth wide, making silence. The woman frowned and looked at Trudy.

“Yes. He doesn’t use his voice-the equipment is all there, but when he cries, there’s no sound. We don’t know why.”

At this, Louisa Wilkes stood up straight. “And how old is he?”

“Just shy of six months.”

“Is there a chance he’s deaf? It’s very simple to test for, even in infants. You just-”

“-clap your hands and see if they flinch. Yes, we’ve known from the start that his hearing is fine. When he’s in his bassinet and I start to talk, he looks around. Why do you ask? Do you know of another case like his?”

“I’m sure I don’t, Mrs. Sawtelle. I’ve never heard of anything like it. What I do know about-well, first of all, I’m not a nurse, much less a doctor.”

“I’m glad to hear that. I’m out of patience with doctors. All they’ve told us is what isn’t wrong with Edgar, and that amounts to everything besides his voice. They’ve tested how fast his pupils dilate. They’ve tested his saliva. They’ve drawn blood. They’ve even taken EKGs. It’s amazing what they can rule out on a newborn, but I’ve finally had to draw the line-I won’t have my baby tormented all through his infancy. And all you have to do is spend a few minutes with him to know he’s a perfectly normal baby.”

Almondine was up now, scenting the bassinet and their visitor with equal concern. Mrs. Wilkes looked down at her. “Benny is such an extraordinary animal,” she said. “I’ve never seen a dog quite so aware of conversation. I could swear he turns toward me when he thinks it is my turn to speak.”

“Yes,” Trudy said. “They understand more than we give them credit for.”

“Oh, it’s more than that. I’ve been around plenty of dogs-dogs that lie on your lap and fall asleep, dogs that bark at every stranger who walks past, dogs that crouch on the floor and watch you like a long-lost beau. But I’ve never seen a dog behave that way.”

Louisa Wilkes looked at Edgar in the bassinet. Then she turned and lifted her hands and moved them through the air, looking intently at Trudy. Her motions were fluid and expressive and entirely silent. She paused long enough to be sure that Trudy realized what she had seen, even if she hadn’t understood its meaning.

“What I just said is, ‘I am the child of two profoundly deaf parents.’”

Another swift flight of hands.

“I am not deaf myself, but I teach sign at a school for the deaf. And I’m wondering, Mrs. Sawtelle, what will happen if it turns out that your boy lacks the power of speech but nothing else.”

Trudy noticed how deftly Louisa Wilkes phrased her questions, a steeliness that emerged the moment she signed. Something almost fierce. Trudy liked that-Louisa Wilkes wasn’t beating around the bush. And Trudy could hardly have forgotten Ida Paine’s pronouncement that autumn night: He can use his hands. At the time, Trudy thought Ida Paine had meant that Edgar would only be able to use his hands, that he was destined for menial work, which Trudy knew was wrong. The whole episode had made her angry, and she’d chalked it up to foolishness-her own. She’d never mentioned the incident to Gar. Now Trudy began to suspect she’d misunderstood Ida Paine.

“He’ll make do, Mrs. Wilkes. I think we’ll find out that there’s nothing else different about Edgar. Perhaps, as he grows, his voice will come. Since we don’t know why it’s gone in the first place, there’s no way to tell if this is temporary.”

“He’s never uttered a sound? Not even once?”

“No, never.”

“And the doctors-what did they tell you to do while you’re waiting to find out if your son might or might not find a voice?”

“That’s been so discouraging. They’ve told me only the most obvious things. To talk to him, which I do, so if he has a choice, he’ll imitate his mother.”

“Did they suggest any exercises? Anything you might do with him?”

“None, really. They speculated on what we might do in a few years if nothing changes, but for now, just watch him. If-when something changes, we go from there.”

Hearing this, Mrs. Wilkes’s reserve, rapidly diminishing ever since the topic had turned to deafness, dropped away entirely.

“Mrs. Sawtelle, listen to me now. I don’t mean to presume anything, and for all I know what I’m about to tell you you’ve already read or been told-though from the sound of it, the doctors you’ve seen have been woefully ignorant, which would not surprise me at all. You cannot begin too early to bring the power of language to children whose grasp may be precarious. No one can say for sure when children begin to learn language-that is, we do not know how early in their lives they understand that they can talk and should talk, that through speech they will lead fulfilling lives. There is, on the other hand, evidence that by the age of one year the gift of language begins slipping away unless it is nurtured. This has happened to deaf children throughout history, and it is quite a terrible thing-children considered retarded and left to fend for themselves-I’m talking about perfectly intelligent, capable children abandoned because they did not know that sound existed. How could they! By the time someone recognized that they lacked only hearing, they were handicapped forever.”

“But everything you say applies to children who can’t hear, not to children who can’t make sound. And there’s no doubt that Edgar can hear.”

“But what about speech? A person communicates by giving as well as taking, by expressing what is inside. Infants learn this by crying-they learn that drawing attention to themselves in even the most primitive way gains them warmth and food and comfort. I worry about your child, Mrs. Sawtelle. I wonder how he’ll learn these things. Let me tell you about myself for a moment. When I was born, my own parents were faced with a dilemma: how could they teach me to speak? They had not learned until it was far too late-in their teens-and so they mastered everything but the production of intelligible speech. And now they had a daughter who they wanted more than anything in the world to speak normally.”

“What did they do?”

“They assumed that I was learning even when I seemed to be doing nothing. They played records with conversations, though they couldn’t hear anything themselves. They bought a radio, and asked their hearing friends to tell them which stations to tune in, and when. They watched my mouth to see if I was making sounds. They arranged for me to spend time with people who could play with me and speak to me. In short, Mrs. Sawtelle, they made sure that verbal language was available to me in every way they could imagine.”

“But there must have been more to it than that. How did they respond when you spoke your first words? How did they encourage you when they couldn’t hear you speak?”

Mrs. Wilkes talked then about the readiness of babies to learn language, how impossible it was to prevent, so long as examples were available. How isolated twins sometimes invented private languages. She went on for quite some time. She had worked with both deaf children and the hearing children of deaf parents, she said, and there was a simple principle: the baby wanted to communicate. It would learn whatever was given as an example, whether English, French, German, Chinese, or sign. As a child, she had learned to sign as well as speak, almost effortlessly. This last point, she said, was most significant for the Sawtelle baby.

“But how can I teach him to sign?” Trudy said. “I don’t know how myself.”

“Then you will learn, together,” Mrs. Wilkes said. “At first, you only need to know enough to talk with Edgar in the simplest ways.”

“Which are?”

“Which are to tell him you love him. To say, here is food. To name things: Dog. Bird. Daddy. Mama. Sky. Cloud. Just like any child. Show him how to ask for things he wants by moving his hands in that sign. Show him how to ask for more of whatever he wants”-and here she bounced the fingertips of both hands together as she talked, to demonstrate-“and later, when the time comes to make sentences, you’ll already have learned how to do that.”

Their conversation went on late into the evening. When Gar came in from the kennel, Mrs. Wilkes began demonstrating the basics. She said she could explain a few signs and straightforward syntax in an evening, and she began with simple words and simple sentences. She showed them a subject-verb-object sentence: “Trudy loves Gar.” She explained the miraculous way in which pronouns are used. She demonstrated an adjective.

Trudy was mesmerized, repeating the signs and following Mrs. Wilkes’s corrections studiously. Gar tried as well, though he lacked Trudy’s coordination and grace. It was near midnight before the woman left-far past the time when they usually went to sleep. Edgar had roused several times during the evening, and when they took him up, Mrs. Wilkes demonstrated how to say “food” and move Edgar’s hands. This was harder, since it required performing the sign backward. But it was possible. And Trudy understood the enormous leverage that practice gives the determined trainer.