Lost Voices

The voices I remember aren’t the right ones. I can recall the tones and timbres, pitches and cadences, the favorite phrases and assertions of many people – even some casual connections, people of questionable importance to me. In dreams, I hear my people talking. And, when I wake, those voices are still with me. Yet, the two most essential, most longed-for ones are missing from my dreams and from my waking memory.

I can’t remember the voices of either of my parents. My father died long years ago – I was twenty then - but my mother’s passing is only a decade behind me. These two voices, the most important ones in my early life, the ones that should be hard-wired into my auditory synapses, are gone. Last night, lying in bed on the tenth anniversary of my mother’s death, I was running through a catalog of family members and listening for my past. Amid the chattering ghosts, I hoped I might hear my mother’s voice. Her often-repeated phrases reverberated, but, soundless - just pale words, hanging silently in the air.

“Ellen, comb your hair. Put on some lipstick.”

“What are you making for dinner?”

“Have you heard from your brother? Have you heard from Stevie?”

Aunt Isabelle, the wife of my mother’s only brother, is one voice I still clearly hear as if she were speaking aloud. Her gravelly, smoker’s utterances often carried behind them a hint of laughter – sometimes a giggle, occasionally, a more earthy chuckle. The promise of adult humor or something darker was present, as well. There were times when her voice turned cool – even cold – when she was displeased or wanted to exert control, but mostly, her declarations were gracious and welcoming.

Her teacher voice, practiced and honed by many years in the front of a middle school classroom, led discussions at our holiday dinners. She never struggled for colorful words and her narrative skills were legend. Well-constructed anecdotes looped together to make her points. Her own mother once suggested that Isabelle and her husband, my quiet, always proper Uncle Johnny, develop a radio or even TV talk show, based on the engaging, humorous stories that Isabelle retold so adeptly to underline her opinions.

“Who do you think actually killed JR?” Isabelle asked in a mock-serious tone, one Thanksgiving.  “Ellen, Joanie, any guesses?” That I never watched that season’s blockbuster hit TV show Dallas, a cultural touchstone, hadn’t ever crossed my aunt’s mind.

At the other end of memory’s dinner table, was my Uncle Johnny, soft-spoken and precise in his choice of words. No hint of a Bronx upbringing or his LawnGuyland adulthood was heard when he spoke. His syllables were plummy, clear and clean - measured tones that played a calm counterpoint to his wife’s more volatile verbal acrobatics. “Isabelle, my dear…,” he’d begin, and gently redirect the discussion, especially if it approached the off-color jokes that we children were hoping to hear.

Dropping in and out of the tableau of my maternal relatives was the chattering magpie Barbara, my mother’s cousin, and her soft-spoken, mostly silent husband, George.

“You kids – out of the way…”, Barbara would bark out at us.

“George, get the platter. The turkey’s about to come out.”

“You need the electric knife. Where did you put it?”

“Yes, hon,” George would softly reply, “is there anything else you need from me? Does anyone need a fresh drink?” He’d smile sweetly at all of us, anxious to be helpful. Occupying himself with finding the knife or cutting a lemon to freshen someone’s drink, he’d attempt to stay clear of his wife’s busyness.

The eldest of them all, My Aunt Lillian with her imperial demeanor, and voice to match, would occasionally deign to join us, escorted by silent Uncle Leo. “Isabelle, how nice of you to have us. How kind of you to send your son to pick us up at the station,” she’d intone. “Leo, here’s my bag,” she’d say offhandedly, handing her purse to him, and her coat to Isabelle.

Even more infrequently, we’d be joined by Lillian’s secretive, elitist sister, Aunt Pauline and her husband Uncle Michel. Michel’s voice just barely hinted at his Parisian birth and retained in it, as well, a slight nod to an Eastern European ancestry. As with Aunt Isabelle, there was a laugh hidden somewhere behind his speech, or maybe just the whisperings of the intellectual cynic who never got over a love/hate relationship he cultivated with the mythical pre-war Europe he’d left as a child. “No, Ellen, I won’t ever go back to Paris. It’s not the city I left, though it had plenty of problems then, of course. But, I still miss it.” He never told me any more about those mysterious, dangerous worries that he guardedly kept unspoken.

My cousins, whiny, nasal, giggly Cari, her husky-voiced older brother, Allan, Isabelle’s son, Bobby – a slight hesitancy, a little uncertainty in his utterances, and Joanie with her warm, practiced, almost syrup-like sentences made up the rest of our small family on my mother’s side.

I can, too, recall my brother’s childhood voice – listening to him painfully practice the ancient chants for his Bar Mitzvah or yelling at my parents.

“Where’s my stuff?” he’d demand of my mother.

“Stay out of my room, damn it.”

His voice was an integral part of my life for nearly forty years. The influence he held over me was powerful and though I haven’t spoken to him in the many years he’s chosen to stay away, if he were to call today, I’d know instantly who was on the other end of the line. As little as a “hello” and my heart would fall, as I’d recognize his New York accent.

My father’s family and their speech patterns were less polished, except for the careful articulation of my other Aunt Isabel, Uncle Max’s wife. She was a Yankee, from a patrician background, and, having started her adulthood as an actress, had created a lovely, mellifluous manner of expressing herself. Max whose declarations were often mistaken for those of his younger brother, my father Peter, spoke with remnants of their childhoods on the edges of Polish-Russian pale. Yiddish, Polish and some Russian were the languages they shared growing up, and Max, though well-read and of a surprisingly sophisticated literary inclination, carried a suitcase of those mongrel cadences with him throughout his long life. To my second-generation ear, I thought he and his brother, my father Peter, simply sounded like every other old Jewish man in New York.

Their younger brother, Sidney, whined. My dad, in whose workplace he “borrowed” some space, referred to Sidney as a “schnorrer” – a moocher and a cheapskate. His pleading, wheedling words were always asking for something.

 “Pete, can you spare a few bucks?”

 “Is there a leftover half a sandwich?”

 “C’mon – you gotta give a guy a break.”

And finally, there was Aunt Ruth, whose self-appointed role in life, was to hold the family together. Her throaty voice pleaded and cajoled her errant brothers to remain close, “Mama would have wanted that,” she’d say to no one in particular, trying to hide her Brooklyn sing-song, hoping that someone would take heed. “Come by and have some tea and cake.”

I am able to lie in bed in the darkest parts of the night, ignoring my husband’s light snoring, recalling my family chattering and challenging each other. But I still can’t remember my parents’ voices. I know that if I heard even an exhalation of their breaths, a simple syllable, I would call out. I know their utterances are hidden somewhere in my auditory cortex and maybe one day, I’ll figure out how to access them. Until then, I take comfort in remembering the unconditional love and promise of security that was carried in those lost voices.