Girl and Five Brave Horses, A (18 page)

When alone, I fell into the habit of reciting poetry or singing aloud to myself. I don’t have much of a voice, and I remembered only a little poetry, so these concerts were usually short-lived. Why we didn’t get a radio, I don’t know. We had had one in California but sold it when we left, for in those days radios were formidable-sized objects and difficult to move. Perhaps this was why it didn’t occur to any of us to get another one. We would be leaving Atlantic City as soon as the season was over and subconsciously must have concluded we would have had to sell a radio within a few weeks of the purchase.

One break in the monotony of my apartment-bound life was provided by friends who now and then came by to visit or take me out for a walk. Usually they were inexperienced in guiding a blind person, their judgment of space or timing being no better than mine, with results that were sometimes near disastrous. Quite unintentionally they would often carefully lead me into holes in the sidewalk, and one day a well-meaning friend guided me right up to an open casement window, the point of which struck me in the eye. It hurt so badly I fainted, but when I came to I was able to tell her that, at least temporarily, she had made me see. All kinds of colored pinwheels and skyrockets zoomed around for a minute.

The difficulty was compounded by my method of navigation; I had a tendency to sway away from whoever was accompanying me. Al, in particular, found this annoying. We would be walking straight ahead, Al holding onto the upper part of my arm, propelling me forward (which, though we hadn’t been told then, was the exact opposite of the manner in which a blind person should be steered; I should have taken his arm and let him lead, not jockey me), when I would suddenly pull away from him and list to one side.

“Why do you do that?” he would ask, as if I had done it on purpose.

“I don’t know,” I would reply. And for a long time I didn’t. Later I realized it was because I had no horizon to keep me on an even keel. What I was experiencing was a slight case of vertigo, that inner-ear confusion familiar to pilots when flying in a fog. At such times one’s sense of what is up and what is down is completely confused because he has no line in front of him to serve as a level.

But among the odds and the ends of living which put new strains and restrictions on me, the worst was not being able to read. I had always been a bookworm and was wild to learn Braille, but there was no school for the blind in Atlantic City. I would have to wait until the season was over and go to the one in Philadelphia. Al would have time then to take me back and forth from Lorena’s farm in Quakertown, where we planned to winter. In the meantime friends tried to fill the gap by reading aloud to me, but their enthusiasm for the project speedily waned. Not that I blamed them. Never having enjoyed reading aloud to anyone, I did not wonder that they didn’t enjoy reading aloud to me.

One day, weary of Mrs. Van Myers’ constant rumble (by then I had heard all the tales of her relatives) and desperate for something to do, I decided to iron. I had been completely dependent on someone else for this job. It fell to Arnette, who was so busy at the pier that I disliked her having to iron my clothes in addition to her own. I had been afraid to try my luck for fear that I might burn myself. Not only that, I doubted my ability to do it without ironing wrinkles into everything.

To my complete surprise, I found it quite easy. My fingers relayed almost all the information that previously had been provided by my eyes, and I managed ruffles and tucks as if I had been using the touch system for years.

Surely the value of the sense of touch can hardly be overestimated. I have often wondered what Helen Keller would have done if that, too, had been denied her. The fingers are, after all, extensions of the eyes and describe to the blind what they can neither see nor hear. Texture, temperature, solidity. How else would a blind person tell? I found out how important it was one day when I put on rubber gloves to do some washing. Immediately I felt as if I had lost my sight all over again and quickly I took them off. The effect was almost frightening.

Naturally this sense was most important when I was in strange surroundings. When we went visiting in a house I had never entered while I was sighted, I could never relax and join in the conversation until I had achieved some measure of orientation. In a new place I had an unnerving feeling that I was looking at the wrong things and would find myself growing uneasy and would have an overwhelming urge to leave. To overcome this feeling I began to ask questions. If my hosts were casual acquaintances I simply requested a description of the room, including the placement of most of its contents, but if I knew them well and anticipated future visits in their home I would ask them to show me around the room and let me familiarize myself with it by touching shelves and tables and doors. When I had done so I could settle down to enjoy their company.

The only time I resisted the use of touch was when it came to identifying people. I could not bring myself to examine their faces with my fingers, no matter how much I wished to know what they looked like. That would have been far too personal, an invasion of their privacy, so I depended on others for facial descriptions, although the descriptions usually were disappointingly inadequate.

I was amazed to find how generally inadequate most people’s powers of observation were. Either that or they did not know how to describe what they saw. I would ask, “What does Carol look like?” and someone would answer, “She’s tall.”

“What else?” I would say eagerly.

“She has brown eyes and dark hair.”

Unless I persisted, little more would be forthcoming. Only later, through some circumstance or other, would I learn that Carol had a widow’s peak, that her eyes were lively, that she stood head-high to Red Lips, and that she had a scar on her chin. Any one of these things would have helped to give me a definite idea of what Carol looked like, but none of this information came from direct questioning.

Many people cling to the belief that the loss of sight stimulates the other senses, particularly the sense of hearing, but I did not find this to be true. A blind person learns to listen closely. Without the loss of sight, hearing is secondary and merely adds another dimension, but when the sight goes the sense of hearing really comes into its own and translates admirably. I have said that while I was still in the hospital it was a great source of encouragement and comfort to me to find that my other senses were taking over. I noticed this with regard to my hearing in the very beginning and often demonstrated it unconsciously.

One day Arnette brought some mending to do while she visited me. After a while I asked her what she was sewing.

“How did you know I was sewing?” she countered, amazement apparent in her voice.

“Because I heard the sound of the thread being pulled through the cloth,” I replied, “and the snip of the scissors.”

If I had been able to see I would hardly have been conscious of these sounds, but, as it was, they were unmistakable. Another time Al raced into the room in a rush between performances. He had been there only a few minutes when he looked at his watch.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“How did you know I looked at my watch?” he said, the same tone of astonishment in his voice as had been in Arnette’s. “I didn’t make a sound!”

“That’s what you think. I heard the rustle of the material when you put your hand in your pocket. I heard the faint ticking when you took it out. It got louder as you held it up to look at it and got fainter when you put it away.”

The action of a woman digging in her purse to find a lipstick, of someone pulling out a pack of cigarettes and extracting one, of uncapping or screwing on the top of a fountain pen—all these actions had and have certain individual sounds, many of them forming definite patterns. I demonstrated the business of pattern to Al by describing to him what we were going to have for dinner. (This after Mrs. Van Myers left and he was doing the cooking.) I nearly floored him when I diagnosed mashed potatoes.

“But how in the world could you know that?” he asked. “You certainly couldn’t smell them. You were halfway across the room.”

“I heard the sack rustle,” I said, “when you got them out. I heard the sound of the big pan when you set it down on the drainboard. You always use the big pan when you boil potatoes, and it has a deeper voice than the others. Later I heard you open the drawer and get something out. When you put it down it had a dull metallic sound, and I knew it was the masher.”

Most cherished of all my faculties however—over sound, over touch, over smell—was memory. During the first months of my blindness people used to ask, “How do you feel about losing your sight? Don’t you miss it more than you would have if you hadn’t been blind all your life?”

The answer to that one has always been, “You can’t miss what you never had,” but I couldn’t use this answer because it seemed to me to have a built-in weakness. Perhaps you can’t truly miss what you have never had; given imagination, however, you can be filled with a yearning to possess what you have never possessed. I found my reply to their question after comparing people who were born blind and those who were blinded later. The answer was, “I wouldn’t take all the money in the world for once having been able to see.”

How can it ever be possible to describe to a person blind from birth the color red? No matter what you say or do, you cannot convey it. Yet in my case, all a person had to say was “red” and immediately the color flashed across my mind; like Mother’s cannas along the back-yard fence; red like the ribbons we tied on Christmas packages; red like the dress I bought when I was sixteen which was supposed to make me wicked. All description is based on comparisons, and I had the basis for comparisons. Nothing could ever take it from me, and it is my most precious legacy.

I am rich in memory, and as long as I have it to rehearse and define I am not really blind.

Two weeks before we were due to leave Atlantic City a friend of mine who knew how I longed to learn Braille called to say that on a shopping trip to Philadelphia she had telephoned the School for the Blind and asked if they knew anyone in Atlantic City qualified to teach Braille. She had been given the name of a Miss Sadie Cohen.

I can never be grateful enough to my friend for having put me in touch with Miss Cohen, who proved to be a really remarkable teacher. She taught me the most advanced form of Braille in just twelve lessons. Many people who have been blind for years never learn to read any but the simplest form. This does not mean that I actually learned to read that quickly; it means that she showed me how the system worked so that I was able to practice it until I became facile at both reading and writing. Over all, this took several months.

Braille is a kind of shorthand that does not use actual letters but a series of dots to represent letters or particular words. The dots are made by means of a stylus, a thin, short piece of metal set into a knob which fits into the palm of the hand and very much resembles a sawed-off ice pick.

Miss Cohen began by explaining the principle of Braille and then, with her slate and stylus, punched out the twenty-six letters of the alphabet on the heavy cardboard of an egg carton, “Because,” she explained, “it is easier in the beginning for the fingers to distinguish the dots or bumps on something heavier than Braille paper.”

In addition to this cardboard she gave me a tiny square of wood containing two parallel lines of three holes each, with pegs to fit into them. The first row of holes was numbered one, three, and five, and the second row two, four, and six. This little block represented one cell on a Braille slate and was ideal to learn on, since it magnified many times the real cell on a slate.

I took the slate and the egg carton home with me and, by pushing the pegs into the holes of the block in all the various positions, soon learned the alphabet. That is to say, my brain did. My fingers learned much more slowly. I went over and over the letters time after time, trying to make them interpret to an impatiently waiting brain the word or letter the dots indicated.

Finally I thought I had mastered the alphabet sufficiently to try reading a book, so after we moved to Quakertown that winter I wrote the distribution center which furnished blind people in that area with Braille books and asked for a copy of
The Count of Monte Cristo.
They informed me that they were sending along the first volume of this story; there were fifteen others! Braille printing takes up a great deal of room, and only a small amount of copy can be put on a page, even though the pages are quite large. When a Braille book is spread out on a table it it is almost the size of a newspaper. The books are not heavy, however, since their paper is of a pulpy texture.

I began my reading eagerly, with my mind clear and willing to understand whatever the finger conveyed to it, but the finger was stupid and faltered time and again. Finally, in a completely instinctive gesture, I laid my forehead on the page and almost immediately seemed to be able to understand what the word or letter was. For a long time thereafter I continued to read in this fashion, until I was finally able to read as well sitting erect as I had with my brain to the page.

Being able to read helped pass the winter for me, as did a visit from Mother.

I had forbidden anyone to tell her about my being in the hospital until we were certain of the outcome, but only when I knew there was no hope had I permitted Arnette to write her. Even then I emphasized the fact that she was not to come yet; I wanted to get accustomed to doing things for myself before she saw me. I knew it was going to distress her, and I wanted to be as agile as I could in as many things as I could in order to relieve at least part of her concern. When I felt that I could do enough for myself to relieve her mind on this score I had Arnette invite her to come and stay with us at Lorena’s.

Al went to meet Mother at the station the day she arrived and drove her to the farm. She came directly to where I was sitting in the living room, and when she kissed me I felt tears on her cheeks. During the next few minutes she hovered over me in a nervous, fluttery fashion, her maternal instinct obviously bent on helping and protecting her offspring; but, being balked by a condition which even her love could not change, she could do little but fuss over me. She seemed afraid that mention of my lost eyesight would make me unhappy, so she carefully avoided it, until finally, to ease the strain, I began to talk about it myself, telling her how it happened and how I felt about it.