What's That Pig Outdoors? (18 page)

Wilmington may have been a fine place to work, but socially it was a wasteland. It was and is a company town; in the 1960s, if you did not work for Du Pont, you were nobody in white-collar society. The
News
and the
Journal
were owned by Du Pont, but their employees—especially the young ones—did not have the social cachet of those in the corporate
mainstream. And if you weren't a member of the Wilmington Country Club, which was practically a Du Pont subsidiary, there wasn't much social life for you.

Hence I spent many of my weekends visiting friends in New York City and in Washington. There was an old girlfriend in Manhattan, but I was especially interested in a Northwestern classmate who had joined the faculty at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Sharon was a Kentuckian, a cute little slip of a thing barely five feet tall from Louisville who had graduated from the University of Kentucky. A former cheerleader, she was perky and bright though not an intellectual. Like Rachel, however, she was warm, open, and curious about everything. And, like Rachel, she was a product of her pre-feminist times, perhaps more alert for marriage prospects than career opportunities.

From the first we got along like puppies. Sharon's casual Kentucky drawl was easy to lipread, and she understood my speech readily. As a Southerner, I think, she had learned to tolerate a wider range of human vagaries, including speech patterns, than most Northerners had. Southerners, in my experience, are more easygoing and patient with people whose behaviors differ from the norm. Why, I don't know. It may have to do with the slower, perhaps less judgmental pace of life below the Mason-Dixon Line.

It was clear from the beginning, however, that Sharon was much more interested in large social groups than I was. She had been the belle of many balls in Kentucky and loved to dress up and go to gatherings that attracted lots of other dressed-up people. Dutifully, I let Sharon drag me to them, though given my druthers I'd have gone someplace else.

At this time, I was starting to learn, perhaps unconsciously, that I functioned best in small groups, not at large parties. The problem didn't lie so much in lipreading; people in large gatherings tend to congregate in small conversational knots that are easy enough for a lipreader to cope with. The difficulty was in making myself understood. Though it is intelligible in a quiet room, my low, nasal, breathy deaf speech easily gets lost in a forest of competing voices. My most troublesome sounds—the fricatives “th,” “f,” and “s” and the long vowels “a” and “e”—are often too diffuse to be discerned against a noisy background. And when I raise the volume of my voice, the sounds tend to grow even more distorted. The noisier the party, the harder it is to understand my speech.

And so I'd stand silently at Sharon's elbow, smiling and nodding as she chattered on. That was all right with me. She talked enough for both of us.

Before this problem could come to a head, however, we had graduated and scattered to our new jobs. Sharon was four hours from Wilmington by car, and in the beginning I'd drive down almost every weekend to visit her in either Washington or Charlottesville. But time and distance inevitably take a toll on every relationship, and one day I received a letter from Sharon telling me, gently but clearly, that there was someone else in her life.

It was just as well. As a Southerner, Sharon was a churchgoing, Biblereading evangelical Christian with a decent respect for virginity, and I a Northern agnostic with small sympathy for either organized religion or traditional sexual codes. That, I am certain, contributed more to the breakup of our relationship than my deafness.

My heart was again broken, although I had been slowly growing aware that our differences spelled doom for our affair. It is always better to be dumper than dumpee, and this was the second time I had been handed my walking papers. There was a difference, however: I had not been rejected because I was deaf. There followed a decent period of mourning, then a return to circulation.

Without an out-of-town girlfriend to go visit, I had to fend for myself in Wilmington. There was a popular bar near my apartment that attracted young downtowners after work—you might call it a rudimentary singles bar, but it was a quiet place, not a noisy circus like modern “meat markets.” There I met two young secretaries and dated them casually for several months. It was then that a special problem of the young deaf adult who lived alone began to emerge: the inability to use a telephone.

For a long time, when I was in high school, I had to ask my friends or Mother or Dad (Buck was off at college) to call my girlfriends to set up dates. This is no way to conduct a love life, having your
mother
ask if so-and-so would like to go to the movies, or maybe to Wimpy's for a shake, or whatever. Mine was very good about it, because there was nothing else to be done. She and I both had to grit our teeth and be brave. I am sure she was as relieved as I when Debbie grew large enough to hold a telephone handset. There is something wonderfully conspiratorial between a big
brother and a little sister in matters of the heart. During the two years I lived at home while attending Medill, Debbie served as a very efficient social secretary, not only calling dates but reminding me when it was time to go out on them.

But I was in Wilmington and she in Evanston. So long as I weekended out of town, I could write letters to set up dates. But without somebody— parent, sibling, friend, roommate—to serve as my telephone mouthpiece, carrying on an ordinary social life in Wilmington was cumbersome. Making dates there required quick footwork at the mailbox. Letters would have to be mailed by Tuesday if a reply was to come by Thursday or Friday, too late to recoup the weekend if my proposal was turned down. Before long I refined the method. I'd be my own mailman, delivering the messages around Wilmington myself, dropping them off in the morning on the way to work and picking up the replies sometimes that evening, sometimes the following morning. The young women I dated in this way were perfectly understanding, if a bit amused by my one-man Pony Express.

They were not entertained, however, when I tried to save a few hours by ringing their doorbells to negotiate the time for a date face to face. Several times a prospective date greeted me in curlers, face cream, and dismay, and I'm certain that on at least one occasion I interrupted something passionate. Urban Americans do not drop in unannounced at each other's homes.

Local dates thus became a sometime thing, and as my out-of-town relationships waned, I began to spend a lot of lonely evenings in Wilmington. Like so many young adults in a strange city, I began to think about home. A host of friends remained in Chicago; would I be happier in my old hometown?

I wrote to Dan Sullivan, who, as good fortune had it, was now copy desk chief of the Chicago
Daily News.
Were there any openings? Yes, there were, and the fellow who did the hiring immediately telegraphed me with a job offer. He was Creed Black, the managing editor, who coincidentally had resigned as editor of the Wilmington papers just before my arrival, in a dispute with the owners over how news affecting Du Pont should be played in its newspapers.

Sullivan sent me a copy of the memo of recommendation he had given Black. “Henry is one of the five or six best students I've had over the years,”
he had said. “At Medill he held his own in the daily copy-desk repartee,” he added, referring to the mostly genial, sometimes sharp-edged abuse copyreaders liked to heap upon each other during slow moments. This was the sole reference in that memo he made to my deafness, and it was an oblique one. Even after a quarter of a century in journalistic harness, I've received few encomiums I'm as proud of as that one.

I was now in the big time as a staff member of a major metropolitan newspaper, and a distinguished one at that. The
Daily News
, more than a century old, had fielded the world's first foreign service and was still known as a writer's newspaper, favoring good prose as well as distinctive reporting. Its veteran correspondents were nationally famous, thanks to the joint news service the
Daily News
put out with its sister morning newspaper, the Chicago
Sun-Times
.

But like big-city evening newspapers everywhere in America, it was losing circulation, owing to the inroads of the 5 p.m. television news and the difficulties of trucking newspapers from the presses to the suburbs on crowded daytime expressways. The moment I sat down for the first time on the rim of the
Daily News
copy desk in May 1965, a white-haired veteran peered from under his green eyeshade, shook my hand gravely, and said, “You're making a mistake, kid. This paper is about to fold.” A dozen years would pass before his forecast came true, and they would be among the best of my life.

8

Almost as soon as I set up housekeeping in my new apartment in a highrise building on Chicago's Near North Side, I obtained a hearing-ear cat. Well, sort of.

Fred was a large yellow tom of vague ancestry. I didn't acquire him expressly as a guide cat; felines are too independent, arrogant, and ornery to be educated about such things. He just arrived one day, an ineffably cute stray kitten, the gift of someone on a floor below who had found him wandering the plaza in front of our building. But Fred had his moments.

Whenever anyone knocked on the door of my efficiency apartment, he'd sit up straight and stare at the door. A second knock and he'd run to the door as if expecting the friendly fishmonger. I'd spot his movements and open the door myself. This worked about 90 percent of the time, so long as I was awake.

At other times Fred could be a hazard. One evening as I slept, he padded in the dark atop the bookcase next to my bed and knocked over my alarm clock. The clock, a popular hardware-store item sold to people who hated noisy alarms, featured a lamp that flashed on and off repeatedly for a minute or two before triggering an audible alarm. It fell on its back, pressing in the plunger that stilled both alarms. As a result, I was two hours late at the
Daily News
, where I worked the midnight-to-8 a.m. shift.

Fred was by no means stupid. While still a kitten he learned that when I was asleep, yowling for his dinner fell on deaf ears, and that only when my eyes were open could he expect me to open the pantry door, too. So he'd roust me out by sitting on my chest and sandpapering my eyelids with his tongue. That is hardly a pleasant way to awaken.

Worse—for him—he seemed to think all humans were deaf, just as I thought, when I was a toddler, that everybody read lips. While still a stripling Fred tried the eyelid-grinding gambit on Craig, a Harvard Law School student who briefly shared my apartment that first summer. Craig awoke with a pained cry and with a reflexive sweep of his hand rocketed Fred across the bed and into the wall. The thump addled Fred's personality, and for the rest of his short life he behaved in unpredictable and neurotic ways.

These days hearing-ear dogs for the deaf are common. Though of course I can't take credit for it, perhaps I was the first to conceive of the idea. Shortly after dawn one brisk spring Sunday when I was in my late teens, I had driven the family collie to the public beach in neighboring Wilmette for a run. I'd thought that no policeman would be around at that early hour to enforce the “No Dogs” sign at the entry to the park.

But no. Within ten minutes a prowl car had parked and an elderly cop trudged through the sand to the water's edge where the boy and his dog sat, the picture of innocent togetherness. “Didn't you see that sign, sonny?” he growled, unholstering his ticket book. He had the drop on me. “Yes, Officer,” I said, thinking fast, “but you see, I'm deaf, and my dog is a hearing-ear dog. You know, like a seeing-eye dog for blind people.”

The policeman gazed at the collie, which by now had trotted a hundred yards up the beach and was sniffing happily at a dead fish, oblivious to the world. Lifting one eyebrow in disdain, the policeman said, “Your driver's license, please.”

Clearly the hearing-ear dog was an idea whose time had not yet come, and the fine was five dollars.