What's That Pig Outdoors? (13 page)

After a hurried meeting with the dean, the head of the language department called me in. “We've decided to design a whole new course for you,” he said grandly. It was a reading course, and with his guidance I would choose literary works to study, then write weekly reports—in French, of course.

At first I was unhappy. Already, I thought, I was falling short of expectations. I wanted to measure up, to be judged by the same standards as other freshmen. As time went on, however, and I dove deep into Camus's
L'Etranger
, then the comedies of Molière and the philosophy of Sartre, I grudgingly appreciated the professor's wisdom. Not being able to converse in French didn't mean I couldn't stretch my intellectual wings in the language as widely as others did. I grew to love the reading, challenging in its own right, and earned respectable marks on my reports, graded as rigorously as those of other freshmen. I could still hold my head high.

Calculus was something else. All freshmen had to pass a semester of it. I was horribly unprepared, for I had not had a mathematics course during my senior year in high school. At first I managed to stay abreast, earning passing grades, but as the year went on I floundered further and further behind.

Soon my exam average had fallen below 70. Trinity's grading was on the percentage system. Marks in the 90s were the equivalent of an A; those in the 80s, B; those in the 70s, C; and anything above 60 was a D but passing. I worked harder and harder, but my average crept lower and lower. I was in an honest-to-God jam. If I failed the course, I wouldn't
be able to retake it, for I'd have lost my scholarship and could not afford to remain at Trinity.

Robert Stewart, who taught my section of the course, was a young instructor and a good teacher, and I did not have great difficulty lipreading him, for he was easy to understand and made sure to face me whenever he discussed the equations he had written on the blackboard. When led step by step through the calculations, I could follow the rigorous mathematical logic. But my understanding was simply too weak for me to fly solo in examinations.

After a soft word from the dean, who had seen the midterm grades, Stewart called me aside after class one morning. “You need tutoring,” he said. “I think if we work together a couple of times a week, we can get you through this course.” But how could I afford to pay for the tutoring? It wasn't inexpensive, and as a scholarship student I had already stretched every dollar as far as it could go. “We'll worry about that later,” Stewart replied.

I have yet to receive his bill, and I'll happily pay it if it ever comes— with compound interest. For I squeezed through the final examination with a 64, kept my scholarship, and remained at Trinity. (Stewart is now head of the Trinity mathematics department.)

Things went well, however, in my remaining courses—surveys of English literature and European history. Though they were called “lecture courses,” the bulk of the work was in reading and in term papers. These required no additional effort beyond the assignments, and from the beginning I was able to earn marks in the low and middle 80s, quite respectable for a freshman. In these courses I learned a new strategy: finding the student who took the most copious lecture notes and asking if I could sit next to him and copy them as he took them down. Nobody ever demurred.

Today deaf students at hearing colleges often use “note packs” of carbon sheets sandwiched with paper, the whole to be slipped under the top sheet of a hearing student's notebooks. As the hearing student converts the professor's lecture into notes, a copy is automatically and effortlessly made for the deaf student, who may or may not be sitting next to the note taker—or even be present at the lecture. Had these been available to me, however, I doubt that I'd have used them. The act of writing notes
helped me retain the material; as I took down the professor's facts and comments, I could digest them thoroughly. Besides, some professors were fairly easy to lipread, especially those in the history department. For some reason, many historians seem to pay attention not only to the art of writing history but also to lecturing about it, with dramatic flourishes. I reveled in their courses.

Many of my note-taking benefactors also made certain to commit the professors' jokes, awful though they might be, to paper so that I could enjoy—or suffer from—them as much as the rest of the class. And they never asked anything in return.

At some point in the lives of all college students—if they are lucky—a love of learning for its own sake knocks on the door of the mind. The long hours of studying no longer seem an onerous duty but are a joy that fills the day. That is the first stride toward a civilized mind, and toward the end of my second year at Trinity it came calling.

The exact moment I've long forgotten. But it probably occurred sometime during my reading of Thomas Wolfe's
Look Homeward, Angel
, an autobiographical novel that justly has been disparaged as a bombastic melodrama of the throes of post-adolescence, suitable only for sophomores. But I
was
a sophomore. The word may connote a know-it-all without a shred of experience, but also means someone on the verge of shedding foolishness for wisdom. Not since
The Grapes of Wrath
had jarred my sixteen-year-old, middle-class complacency had a book so affected me, and I devoured as much of Wolfe as I could. I barely noticed that
Of Time and the River
and
The Web and the Rock
were thinly disguised rewrites of Wolfe's first novel, their heroes plagued by the same callow self-obsession. Wolfe's characterizations may have been juvenile, but his prose style was hypnotic. I studied his rolling, sonorous sentences, marveling at the way they often started on tiptoe, almost hesitantly, then strode and sprawled as if exalted.

Like every undergraduate who first experiences literary intoxication with Wolfe, I tried to adopt his dramatic style. Fortunately, I was unsuccessful. I was still branded by the
Time-Life
journalese that had entered my sensibility at an early age, with backward-running sentences and stampedes of
adjectives trampling lonely nouns. A brief infatuation with Hemingway's spare, skeletonized style followed, and that may have helped.

What did take root was a love for the way words sounded. I could not, of course, hear them—the auditory spectrum was beyond my competence. But words have definite and distinct vibrations and I could roll them across my tongue, feeling how they thrummed on my throat, cheeks, teeth, lips, and nose. Nose. Knows. The nose knows. The
nnozze knowzz.
My nostrils would resonate with each “n,” my lips with each “o.” The “z” brought forth a delicious low buzz on the tips of the front teeth.

All this I could “hear” on the tympanum of my mind. Was this just imagination, or a genuine echo from somewhere deep in the cells of memory, a soft electrical charge still strong enough to preserve some of the lost hearing of the precocious three-year-old who could belt out every verse of “The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You”? I began to say the words as I wrote them, softly sounding out each sentence as it appeared on the page.

In the beginning the result was cacophonous, for I was trying to pack a whole orchestral composition into a sentence. Not for a long time would I learn that one first had to master stress and tempo, meter and melody— the entire spectrum of English prosody—while at the same time striving for simplicity and clarity. That lay largely in the future. But the embarrassingly long, intricate, and exquisitely balanced sentences with which I began to dress my literature and history papers were at least a start.

By the end of the sophomore year every student's academic strengths and weaknesses ought to be evident, and mine were. Mathematics and science clearly were not my métier. Galvanized by literature, I chose English for a major, but with a strong minor in history. Those should be unsurprising choices. Except for drama, both are solitary disciplines. Excellence in them is measured by breadth and depth of research and in the resultant written examinations and papers.

Hearing and speaking are irrelevant. In those courses of study my deafness was neither hindrance nor asset, except possibly in the early habits I had acquired while still in high school—the habits of extra reading and writing to compensate for not being able to lipread my teachers consistently. Earlier than most other students, perhaps, I had learned how to start researching a question—how, in short, to use a library. To a student, deafness is not always a disadvantage.

Neither is it an advantage. It seems logical to think that the deaf can concentrate more intensely than the hearing—that we can shut out distractions more easily than others and get more work done in a given amount of time. That's not true at all. We're sensitive to many of the same noises that drive other people crazy. The booming bass of the super-stereo in the next room reverberates on the floor, tingling the soles of our feet, and we're just as conscious of that as you are of the assault on your ears. We can feel dump trucks rumbling by on the street underneath our dorm windows and the nervous knee drumming of the student on the other side of the library table.

But we can't identify many of those noises, and that's what's so maddening. Suppose a heavy thump, then a skittering dribble jolts you, a hearing scholar, out of a reverie as one rowdy student body-checks another into the wall, then both laughingly scramble after a loose football bouncing down the dormitory hall. “Shaddup!” you'll shout in irritation, instantly recognizing the racket for what it is, and then return to your work.

But I must get up from my desk and go find out what made all that tumult. Has someone returning from a fraternity party passed out and fallen on the floor? Is someone trying to get my attention by body-slamming my locked door? “What the hell's going on?” I demand as I whip open the door and behold the grinning pile of students on the floor before me. They look up at me in amazement. How could
he
. . .?

What's more, they want to know, how am I so easily aware when someone walks quietly and unseen into the room behind me? I smile. Some secrets are worth keeping, some mysteries worth maintaining. I don't tell them that perhaps it's just the almost imperceptible puff of air ruffling the hair on the back of my neck as a caller opens the door. Or a familiar creak of a floorboard by the doorway. Or the slight reflection of a glint of light from my reading lamp on the moving doorknob in the glass of a framed photograph that hangs on the wall just above my desk. Sometimes I'm reading a newspaper and suddenly, on the sensitive membrane of an open page, feel the vibrations of a hearty basso “Hello!” from behind me.

I also don't tell them that all these stratagems can fail me. Sometimes, if I succeed in attaining an intense trance of concentration, I unconsciously shut off all my receptors, tactile and visual. You could play hockey with
anvils two feet from my head and I would not twitch. When I am deep into such spells, someone who does not know I am deaf might approach my back unseen and speak to me. When I do not answer, he'll repeat his statement. If I ignore him a third time, he'll repeat it again, with mounting irritation. I always seem to awaken and turn around innocently at the precise moment the other fellow growls, “What's the matter? Are you deaf?”

Sadly and sweetly—for there is no other way, if the poor fellow is not to dissolve in a puddle of resentful embarrassment—I nod, smile, and say, “Yes.”

I'm convinced that most students at Trinity regarded me benignly, with a mixture of respect for my academic performance, approval of my independence from my handicap, and amusement over my parlor tricks. I was by no means a Big Man on Campus, but neither was I a wallflower. Two fraternities—my brother's rambunctious Sigma Nu and the more sedate Theta Xi across the street—offered me pledge bids, and I accepted the latter. For two years the fraternity would be the center of my social life and the classroom for a new course of instruction—not an academic offering, but a practical survey in the stresses of interaction between the hearing majority and the deaf minority.