The History of Sound: Stories

A third-person narrator tells the protagonist Hope’s story. In 1893, Hope visits the Harvard Peabody Museum with her husband Harold. The two get separated, and Hope finds herself in front of the case containing Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka’s Models of Glass Plants. 

Hope is suddenly distracted when she notices a little boy in the gallery who looks exactly like her former husband Sam. The more she watches him, the more acute the resemblance seems. The child could be Sam’s son from his other marriage. Worse, the boy could be Eli, her and Sam’s son who she left with her brother Davis and his wife Annabelle 12 years before. Harold knows nothing of this facet of her life, so Hope tries to act calm.

Twelve years prior, Hope left home unexpectedly. She was 20 and felt trapped on Cape Cod, working her late father’s orchards with her mother and brother. She disappeared one night, eventually finding work in another orchard in Hatfield, where she met Sam and fell in love. They started sleeping together in secret, and eventually, Hope got pregnant. Although Hope didn’t want “to be a mother” (79), she did want to be with Sam.