What's That Pig Outdoors? (14 page)

Human beings, as individuals, are inclined to be kindly, compassionate, and tolerant. Most hearing people, in my experience, can readily form friendships with a deaf person—provided that they have something in common and can communicate with one another. With such one-to-one relationships I have always been comfortable. So long as the other person faces me, perhaps speaking a bit more slowly than usual, and can give me undivided attention, we can connect. In the beginning there might be mild unease with each other's unfamiliar way of speaking, but with a little time and experience, we learn to talk with each other smoothly and easily, letting down our guard and accepting things as they are.

In groups, however, such swift lines of communication tend to break down. The hearing find others like them easy to talk with; communication with a deaf person requires conscious effort. So involved in their conversation do groups of hearing people become that they tend to forget
that a deaf person might be with them, needing help. To the lipreader, people in group conversations talk rapidly, the conversational ball rocketing from mouth to mouth almost faster than the eye can see. It's hard for a lipreader to jump into such a conversation, and when one does not contribute to it, one simply is not present in the minds of others.

One night the Theta Xi brothers sent their pledge class of nine sophomores out on a scavenger hunt. Our quarry was chosen with typical fraternity-boy humor: a dead cat and other objects too tasteless to mention. We piled into a car and drove around Hartford searching for objects. Having scoured the city for all it could offer, we headed into the Connecticut countryside. I sat in the crowded back seat of the darkened car, understanding nothing of what the other pledges said. It was nearly pitch black.

As we drove aimlessly, the minutes rolling by, I began to grow impatient. “Would somebody turn on the light and tell me what's going on?” I said. Nobody answered. A few moments later I said, “Hey, what
are
we doing?” The fellow sitting next to me gave me a none too gentle elbow in the ribs.

Five minutes later, quite at the end of my patience and beginning to fret—two hours of seemingly purposeless wandering about the boondocks is bound to raise a twinge of worry—I said, “Goddamnit. Why won't anybody tell me what's going on?” The dome light flashed on. A pledge sitting in the center of the front seat turned and said angrily, “If you don't shut up, I'll punch you in the mouth.” I sat back, stunned and hurt, and said nothing to anyone until we returned to the fraternity house in the small hours.

I never did find out what was going on in the car that night. Perhaps the pledges were tired and upset over their lack of success in tracking down the items on the scavenger list and had run out of patience and tolerance for anything, let alone a deaf fellow pledge. Perhaps I unwittingly said the wrong things at the worst possible moments. Whatever the truth, what was obvious was that the threads of communication I had spun with them as individuals were too fragile to survive in a group under stress. But we never did return with a dead cat. We were too kindhearted to kill one.

These were not cruel and thoughtless people, but intelligent young men who, beyond our brief intellectual conversations, had had no experience with the deaf. They simply assumed that I, as a fellow Trinity student and

Theta Xi pledge, would share their capabilities. Only with experience could they learn my limitations—and I was still learning them myself.

Although the episode would stick in my memory, I couldn't stay dismayed for long. Besides, on ordinary (and well-lighted) occasions, I managed to get along well with my fraternity brothers. At the end of our junior year I campaigned for and was elected corresponding secretary—a largely ceremonial position that involved writing occasional letters to college and city officials and alumni. For nearly three years, my time at Trinity settled into a mostly normal, ordinary—and happy—life.

And for the first time in my young manhood, I fell in love, into the kind of all-consuming grand passion that falls just short of obsession. In high school and the first two years at Trinity I had continued to date, even to the point of “going steady” once or twice, but my relationships with the opposite sex had remained callow. Girls were either good buddies or objects of lust.

This was, after all, the Eisenhower Age, an era that still prized virginity. Young women armored themselves before dates, wearing heavy panty girdles below and cantilevered, hard-plastic constructions called “Merry Widows” above. We young men boasted about our sexual activities in baseball cliches. “First base” was, of course, a kiss. “Second base” was those treasures guarded by the Merry Widows. “Home runs” were rare and much lied about. Like most, I had been a low-average spray hitter occasionally lucky enough to stretch a single into a double.

Rachel was the same age—twenty—and a student at Tufts University near Boston, three hours east of Hartford. We had met the summer between our sophomore and junior years at Camp Echo. I had been drawn instantly to this extraordinary girl from Glencoe, a wealthy North Shore suburb. She was tall and pretty, with a warm, friendly manner, a dimpled smile that could disarm a gunman, and a Junoesque body. She was also one of the most dynamic people I had ever met. Not only could she hold her own in free-for-alls about Heidegger or Manet, but she was also a gifted dancer who often starred in musicals at Tufts, as well as a class officer and an accomplished student.

How Rachel was able to juggle all these things and carry on a heavy
weekend relationship with a student at another college I'll never quite know. But we managed to see each other almost every weekend, thanks to buses between Hartford and Boston and the extraordinary generosity of a fraternity brother and roommate, Sam Curtis, who was not averse to loaning a good friend the keys to his brand-new Volkswagen.

That autumn was a classical college idyll, with fraternity parties, football weekends, and passionate nights in off-campus motels. It was one of the happiest times of my young life. The problems of deafness seemed irrelevant, a thing of the past. Rachel and I were, in the romantic conceit of the young, a single entity, each half of which could anticipate the every feeling and thought of the other.

First passions always end painfully, and mine was no different. At some point in our relationship, I think, Rachel began to realize that the mysterious, miraculous abilities of the deaf young man with whom she was smitten were in truth not all that extraordinary. He had genuine limitations. He did not have the social polish of the other young men she knew. With her friends and family he was shy, awkward, and uncommunicative. Nothing in his manner suggested that he might be bound for the boardroom, to become a captain of industry who could provide a comfortable life.

Rachel came from a well-to-do family, one that measured success by income and social position. I had neither of those, nor aspirations in those directions—or any other, for that matter. At twenty I was not mature enough to know what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. One day I might talk about attending law school, the next about studying archaeology, the next about going immediately to work as an insurance man. Or maybe I might become a poet. I was no model of stability.

Rachel's father, the founder and president of a successful manufacturing company, could not stand me, and I cannot blame him. I couldn't lipread him easily and, perhaps more unconsciously than consciously, avoided talking to him whenever I visited Rachel's house. Evasiveness is hardly a desirable attribute in the character of a prospective son-in-law— especially one who seemed never to have anything interesting to say, let alone a useful future. Besides, they were Jewish and I an unchurched Protestant—and in those days, religious differences were much more important to the parents of young people than they are today.

If Rachel's mother, however, harbored negative feelings about the young man who was so clearly crazy about her daughter, she kept them well hidden. She was kindly and considerate toward me, and we had many long talks while I waited for Rachel to come downstairs to go out on a date with me. I could see that Rachel had inherited not only her father's drive but also her mother's warm curiosity.

Matters came to a head at the end of the summer between our junior and senior years. Rachel and her family—including her two younger sisters—headed for Europe. For the first time in six years, I did not return to Camp Echo. I wanted to do something different, to enjoy new experiences. Sam Curtis and I decided to drive west, to earn money as fruit and vegetable pickers in the San Joaquin Valley of California. My parents were dismayed, but theirs was a quiet and unexpressed disapproval, because they knew that if I was to grow into an independent adult, I needed to make mistakes and learn from them.

As they expected, Sam and I didn't pick a single bean, but we enjoyed ourselves all the same. In his Volkswagen we drove southwest to Los Angeles down romantic Route 66. We camped by the edge of the Grand Canyon, where we learned for the first time the deeper implications of the word “immense.” We fought off a homosexual motelkeeper in San Bernardino and went deep-sea fishing off Santa Catalina Island with my great-uncle, a childless, adventurous man who loved his many nephews as if they were his own sons.

We slept under the stars in a high-country campground in Yosemite National Park, where one morning I spoke crossly to Sam because he had failed to wake me when a black bear a few yards away batted a garbage can around as if it were a medicine ball. How could he have let me sleep through such an adventure? He was, he said, too frightened to move. We got drunk in Reno, roasted in Death Valley, and awoke shivering in snow-covered sleeping bags in a place in the Colorado Rockies called Neversummer Pass.

When our money ran out we returned to Evanston, where we replenished our exchequer running informal swimming classes for neighborhood children at the beach; ours was really a babysitting service, but we did teach some youngsters to swim. Once again flush, we drove to New Orleans and sipped espresso and ate beignets at the Morning Call,
where we imagined ourselves poets. And as August neared an end and our stake dwindled, Sam dropped me off in Evanston, then returned to his Connecticut home for a few days before the academic year began. We were high as kites. We had seen the world and henceforth nothing would chain us to the old farmstead.

Then Rachel and her family came home from Europe. Much to the displeasure of her father, I was waiting at the door of their home as they arrived from O'Hare. Rachel took my hand as the others unloaded the taxi. “Let's go for a walk, Hank,” she said, without inviting me inside. As we walked, she told me that she and her sisters had had long talks about me in Paris and Rome. They had wept, she said, as they compared my amiable charm with my prospects as a potential husband and breadwinner. “Hank, you are deaf,” said Rachel, who had always been blunt and honest in our relationship. “You're a wonderful guy and I'll always love you. But how are you going to make a living? What are you going to be able to do? You yourself don't know. I need something more than that.”

Naturally I tumbled into a maelstrom of affection, confusion, anger, and denial. I had loved Rachel for her frankness, and I still did, even if her words hurt mightily. Years later, putting myself in her place, I had to admit that what she said carried more than a germ of truth. Even at twenty-one I was too immature, too unformed to have any sort of prospects. Maybe I was bright and funny and a joy to be with, but I had no idea what I was going to do after graduation. And my by now habitual reticence with people I did not know was not an encouraging sign.

Rachel, bless her heart, had attempted to end the relationship as kindly as she could, but also as cleanly and surgically as possible, so there would be no mistake in her meaning. Our old relationship was over, she said, but we could still “be friends.” Grudgingly and slowly I accepted the situation, and we did remain friends. From time to time during our senior year we met for a chat. One afternoon a few weeks before graduation, as we sat comfortably together in the foyer of her dormitory at Tufts, she confessed her worries for her future. “If only I could get married!” she said. “What about me?” I thought—but with only the briefest twinge of regret.

We remained in occasional friendly touch for a couple of years, until she married. She still lives in Glencoe, a homemaker and wife of a wealthy man, mother of four, active in civic and social affairs. I have not seen her
for more than a quarter of a century, but my memories of her are fond ones, and I dearly hope that she is happy. My only regret for her is that she was born ten years too soon. If she had grown up in America during the feminist revolution of the early 1970s, she might have directed that awesome energy down avenues that could have made her famous.