What's That Pig Outdoors? (12 page)

I don't know precisely how the Y officials felt about my lack of hearing, but like the school authorities, they seemed open-minded enough to allow me to try one step at a time, and if I negotiated it successfully, to go on to the next. For four summers, beginning in 1957, I played barracks sergeant to a dozen thirteen-and fourteen-year-old-hearing boys. I was, I think, as adept as any other counselor, and the problems I had seemed no different from anyone else's.

The only limitation the camp director imposed on me as a staff member was to excuse me from lifeguarding duties. “I know you can do the job,” he said, “but if our insurance agent visited camp and found a deaf guy being a lifeguard, what's he going to think? He doesn't know you. He doesn't have time to be convinced; He's going to raise our rates through the roof.”

It was easier for me to accept that pragmatic decision because I had another waterfront responsibility that was just as heavy: while other counselors stood lifeguard duty at the swimming area, I ran the water-skiing program outside it. Much of the time I'd drive the tow boat, instructing skiers with hand signals. Sometimes I'd stand in the water by the dock, helping novices learn the complex and unfamiliar skill of getting up on skis. Either way, I was responsible for their safety. Nobody thought my deafness a liability on the lake outside the boundaries of the swimming area. Maybe the noise of the tow boat's outboard motor made hearing an academic issue. In any case, I never felt that anyone patronized my abilities.

Except for me. My long-simmering fear of speaking in public led me, that first summer as a counselor, to hobble myself needlessly. It happened when another counselor, a quiet and popular fellow of college age who suffered from a terrible stammer, froze one morning while trying to deliver the brief chapel homily with which the camp began its day. Nakedly, agonizingly, he stood before some 150 campers and counselors, the sweat bursting from his brow, trying to get out the first word. Minutes passed. He tried, and tried again, his face flushing with humiliation. Finally an older counselor stood up, squeezed his arm in commiseration, spoke a few words, and quietly dismissed the assembly.

A few of the younger campers may have snickered, but most of us sat in silent sympathy. We liked Pat, and we didn't know what to do. I suffered with him. I knew what was going through his mind. When he disappeared that night, abandoning his job to wrestle with his devils, I wasn't surprised. That could have been me up there, I thought. Maybe I would have frozen, too. The next day I stopped the director and told him that what had happened to Pat might happen to me, too. Could he excuse me from giving chapel and speaking before assemblies?

He did. That may not have been the wise thing to do. Maybe he should have insisted, “No, Hank. You can do it, and I don't want to hear any more of that nonsense.” Just the same, there was nobody to blame but myself. I was responsible for my own actions.

Later in the summer, however, the director made an astute decision on the only other occasion at Camp Echo I can remember in which my deafness became an issue. The parents of one of my campers had heard that the young man charged with their son's care was deaf.
They demanded that their boy be moved to another cabin under a more capable counselor, one who could hear. The director quietly reassigned the child without telling me why. Cabin reassignments weren't uncommon, but not for years did I learn the reason for that one. The director knew that a youth who was just turning seventeen was not mature enough to handle with equanimity that sort of ignorant thoughtlessness on the part of someone he had never met.

I was growing mature enough, however, for some new experiences. At siesta time one August afternoon, an older counselor pressed a well-thumbed paperback into my reluctant hands. “Give it a try,” he insisted.

The book was
The Grapes of Wrath
, by John Steinbeck, of whom I had only vaguely heard. To me, an indifferent schoolboy, the cover did not look promising. Depression? Dust bowl? Tenant farmers? Okies? Old stuff long forgotten. Who cares?

Within an hour I was electrified. Almost all night I sat up with a flashlight in the darkened cabin, my charges sleeping quietly while I read of the trials of Steinbeck's Joad family.
The Grapes of Wrath
opened my young eyes to many things. For the first time I learned of my country's appalling history of labor exploitation and the blinkered refusal of its economic royalists to appreciate the misery of the dispossessed. The novel's graphic depiction of human dignity in the face of adversity showed me, a white-bread middle-class Midwestern suburbanite of the Eisenhower Age, that the poor and unlettered were capable of astonishing heroism, and that it could be celebrated in epic fashion.

For the rest of that summer I devoured as much Steinbeck as I could get my hands on. One by one I read his other fine novels of the 1950s—
Tortilla Flat, In Dubious Battle
, and
Of Mice and Men.
Steinbeck became my new hero, replacing Joe DiMaggio. For the first time the urgency of literature had struck me.

Expanding on this discovery, however, had to wait. When September rolled around and school resumed, I was suddenly and to my considerable surprise a prominent member of the senior class, one whispered about by goggle-eyed freshmen and envious sophomores as I passed them in the hall. But I was no longer the “deaf kid,” as I had imagined my schoolmates had condescendingly classified me. I was the managing editor of the school paper, a true celebrity. Not necessarily because of any cogent wisdom or
witty repartee in my columns, but because of one of the perks of the job. I was one of a handful of students who held a coveted “open pass” that allowed me to leave the campus at any time during my lunch and study periods, presumably on official school business, but sometimes just to enjoy a cigarette. In those days student smoking was strictly forbidden, with frequent detentions for those caught stealing a puff on school property. Most tobacco addicts had to suffer without a fix from eight in the morning to three in the afternoon. Often, however, pretending to be off checking proofs at the printer's or interviewing a prominent downtown merchant, I'd drive around the block furiously inhaling a Lucky Strike, then return in plenty of time for the next class. (Not for nineteen years would I succeed in kicking the habit.)

Naturally this new prominence did wonders for my maturing ego, and I was as comfortable as any fellow senior, airily treating underclassmen with benign contempt. Why, I even spoke up in class on occasion, though I still hated and dreaded delivering any sort of formal address, and was an expert at ducking that responsibility. I had also begun to outgrow my pimply awkwardness with girls and had started dating regularly, though not as earnestly as some other seniors. Like most of the men in my family, I was a late bloomer in my relations with the opposite sex. Not until well into my college career would I enjoy my first grand passion. Nonetheless, I moved easily among a variety of social circles, although I lacked the smooth, polished manner of the truly self-assured. I even had a splendid time at the senior prom—a highly charged event that often tested the social and emotional mettle of youths in the 1950s.

On graduation day I ranked a respectable 90th in a class of 591 students. The nightmares of eighth grade seemed far in the distance.

6

Like every college freshman of any era, I had an enormous adjustment to make when I arrived at Trinity College. No longer was I a member of the elite, a standout in the crowd. As high school seniors, the three hundred members of the new Class of 1962 at this distinguished “little Ivy” men's college in Hartford, Connecticut, had been proud cocks of the walk. Now we all were hatchlings again, scratching nervously for our places in a strange new barnyard.

Half were public high school graduates, the other half products of Eastern prep schools. Many of us “publics” harbored vague feelings of social and intellectual inferiority toward the wealthy men's sons who wore the old school ties of Choate, Exeter, and Andover. How could we possibly compete with these blond young Apollos who drove Jaguars, quoted Cicero, dated Muffys from Smith and Graemes from Holyoke, and looked forward to instant vice presidencies in the family firms? So overwhelming a challenge did that seem that it never occurred to me to worry about making the grade as a deaf student at a hearing college.

I had chosen Trinity for three reasons: because it was small and intimate, with an excellent student-professor ratio; because it had awarded me a partial scholarship, which I badly needed; and because Buck had made a bold mark there. The previous June he had graduated in a gust of glory, with honors in economics and a Phi Beta Kappa key. Moreover, he was a member of Medusa, the elite palace guard of nine seniors—the highest honor a Trinity undergraduate could achieve. He had also won a Woodrow Wilson fellowship for postgraduate study at Northwestern.

But I was not fretting about living up to that example. Luckily I had never suffered from the second-son complex. Certainly I'd followed in Buck's large footsteps down many trails, but instead of resenting the ine
vitable comparisons other people made between us, I welcomed them. I felt that his success had established a family tradition, that people would measure my performance not as a deaf student but as a Kisor, and that their expectations therefore would be high. I was proud to be Buck's little brother and grateful for his achievements.

In the beginning, though, Mike Mather wasn't so proud to be my roommate. Just before he arrived on campus from his home in Perrysburg, Ohio, the dean's office had asked him to drop by before going to his new room in Elton Hall. “You're going to be rooming with a deaf student,” the dean told Mike. “We felt it only fair to tell you before you meet him.” Mike was thunderstruck. He had all the usual worries of a brand-new freshman, but he had never dreamed that he would have to play nursemaid to a . . .
cripple!

When he walked into our room, his expression was a woebegone mixture of horror and resignation. “Hello, Mike,” I said cheerily, bubbling over with nervous enthusiasm. “Glad to meetcha. Had lunch yet? Want to grab a burger?”

“Uh . . . yeah,” he said. “No. Yeah. Huh?” The cripple
walked!
The cripple
talked!

Weeks later we would both laugh as Mike told the story of our meeting to a knot of fellow freshmen in a tavern on the edge of campus. We never became fast friends, for he was more mature than I, deeply serious about his studies, and always concerned about money. I, in turn, believed in taking time out to play and never worried where my next dime would come from, even though I was also a scholarship student. Somebody or something, I reasoned, would provide.

Yet Mike and I shared a mutual respect; after our first week together, he later told me, he never again felt that a special responsibility had been dumped upon him. We remained roommates our sophomore year, in a prized four-man suite on the historic old quadrangle, but a few days after Christmas break that year, we received a solemn letter from Mike telling us he had simply run out of money and had had to withdraw to attend a less expensive public college near his hometown.

Though the dean never thought I'd need a nursemaid, he didn't necessarily share all the high expectations I had for myself. He knew certain adjustments would have to be made, though he probably did not know exactly
what they would be. Trinity had not had a deaf student since the middle of the nineteenth century, but, like the officials at Evanston High, the dean seemed to believe in taking things a step at a time, letting problems arise and then dealing with them as appropriate. I was a
tabula rasa
, but Trinity let me hold the chalk. It was all up to me—with a little discreet help.

The first problem arose during the first week of classes.
“Comment vous appelez-vous?”
asked the professor of French. “What?” I replied, dumbfounded. I still could not lipread
un mot
of the language, let alone speak it with any facility. This was not going to work, the professor knew. He taught his course entirely in French, and expected his students to respond in it. Not that I wanted to take the course; a year of a foreign language was one of the requirements for graduation.