What's That Pig Outdoors? (19 page)

But now the time had come for other ideas. Ever since I had retired my squealing hearing aid at age ten, I had not used any kind of artificial device to make up for my deafness. None had seemed necessary, and in any event I knew of none. I could always depend on hearing people to make phone calls or answer the doorbell. But now that I was a bachelor living solo in a high rise, with friends to come calling, it was clear I needed help. Fred notwithstanding, I had to be able to know when someone was buzzing
my apartment from the foyer many floors below, so that I in turn could press a button to let the caller into the building.

My old chum Sam Williamson, now a brand-new Ph.D. in economics and an instructor at the University of Iowa, had the answer. Since boyhood he had been an electronics hobbyist, the sort of inspired tinkerer who could build a shortwave radio out of bell wire and bottle caps. One day, when he paid a visit to my apartment, I laid the problem before him. He thought for a moment, then borrowed a screwdriver and removed the grille that concealed the apartment's intercom system. He poked about inside, nodded sagely, then said he'd be back the next weekend with something that ought to work.

He returned with a crude wooden box painted black, several wires hanging from its innards. Inside lay a spaghetti maze of wire and switches. Sam placed the box on a table underneath the grille, wrapped the bare ends of two slim wires around terminals on the buzzer, then plugged a common household electrical cord into a 115-volt outlet in the wall. Instantly I saw the principle, which sounds complicated but is really very simple.

When someone far below pressed the annunciator button, the buzzer's current would trip a low-voltage relay switch. That in turn would trip another relay, a bigger one. The large relay switch would close a second circuit. At one end of the second circuit was the electrical cord and plug for the 115-volt house current. At the other end was a receptacle into which Sam plugged an ordinary table lamp. Inside the lamp's electrical socket Sam placed a thin metal wafer, a common dime-store device that causes a light bulb to flash constantly.

When I saw the flashing light, I'd go over to the box and turn off the circuit. Sam, who carefully thinks things through, had anticipated that I might not be within view of the lamp at first, so had constructed the circuit to stay on, flashing the lamp, until I finally saw it and pressed a button on the box to douse the light. Before leaving the apartment I'd turn off the entire thing with a switch so that the device would not flash endlessly in my absence, perhaps alarming people in the street below.

What a brilliant idea! I pumped Sam's hand, thanked him profusely, and blessed him and all his children and grandchildren to come.

Today Sam's black box seems embarrassingly primitive. A good-sized emporium devoted to gadgets for people with disabilities might be stocked
with scores of electronic “assistive devices” now available for the hearingimpaired. No deaf parents of a newborn, for instance, would be without a “baby crier,” a microphone affixed to a crib that flashes a lamp when the infant wails. Or other such electronic visual attention getters as burglar alarms, wake-up alarms, fire and smoke alarms, pagers, phone and doorbell signalers, and more. Some of them, like Sam's gadget, operate ordinary household lamps. Others use strobe devices that look like electronic camera flashes but pack the power of stun grenades. Bed shakers, rough cousins of motel-room Magic Fingers massagers, awaken exceptionally sound sleepers. These devices were a long time coming—many of them had to wait for the invention of the transistor—but when they finally began to appear, they made the lives of deaf people immeasurably easier. Including mine.

The telephone is probably the world's most unremarked appliance; once installed, it hardly earns a second thought in the hearing household. Telephone amplifiers for the hard-of-hearing have been around for a long time, but the deaf had no means of communicating on the phone until the late 1950s, when a deaf Bell Telephone engineer finally had a bright idea that solved the problem for some hearing-impaired people. He invented a device that would allow old wire-service teletype machines with keyboards to be plugged into ordinary voice telephone lines so that they could “speak” to each other. On one machine a deaf person typed out a message that was instantly transmitted to another teletype, which tapped it out onto a roll of paper. Thus was born the TTY, as the deaf world calls the teletypewriter.

For those who could afford one, the TTY was a salvation from telephone isolation, but it had its drawbacks. Teletype machines were big, ugly, and rackety—not that the noise disturbed their owners. And a TTY user could (and still can) talk only to another person owning a similar device.

The closed world of the deaf grew larger, but it remained circumscribed, for TTYs were to be found only among deaf people and their organizations. As I grew into young manhood, I often wished I owned a TTY, but inasmuch as all my friends and family were hearing, the idea of having such a device seemed an exercise in listening to the sound of one hand clapping.

That is, until the Sensicall came along in 1966, not long after Sam bestowed his magic set of relays upon me. It was a simple device cobbled
together by a Western Electric telephone engineer and rented for a nominal sum by Illinois Bell. Nothing more than a small black box that plugged into an ordinary telephone, it bore a tiny red lamp that flashed on and off in time with the voice of the person calling. The idea was for a deaf person to watch the red lamp blink in Morse code as a hearing caller voiced the code orally with short “di”s and long “dah”s. With pencil and paper the deaf user could then decode the message—on the fly, if he knew Morse—and answer by speaking normally into the receiver.

This was a godsend. Only one of these devices was necessary—at my end. I could call perfect strangers, and explain with speech that I was deaf but used a flashing lamp device that would respond to the oral noises they made. They might not know Morse code, I would say, but I'd ask simple yes-and-no questions that they could answer with a short “di” for “yes” or a long “dah” for “no,” and I'd watch the flashing lamp and understand them that way.

This notion worked better in theory than it did in practice. For technical reasons my breathy speech does not come across well over the phone, unless the listener is accustomed to it. And almost always, a hearing person, confronted on the phone by a peculiar-sounding stranger with an outlandish proposal about flashing lights and “di”s and “dah”s, would be thoroughly nonplussed. Usually he'd hang up before I had a chance to finish my spiel. Clearly this idea needed more work.

Yet once my family and friends were “trained” in Morse—the process consisted of handing them small wallet-sized cards printed with the code—I could “talk” with them. Slowly and clumsily, yes, for the caller had to search out on the code card each combination of sounds that made up a letter of the alphabet, then sound it out into the telephone mouthpiece. Things stopped while I decoded each letter, then asked for the next one. The caller had to voice each sound crisply; drawling or huskiness often caused the lamp at my end to flicker crazily.

But the Sensicall was better than nothing. As Dr. Johnson observed about a dog's walking on its hind legs, one marveled not that it was done well but that it was done at all. And at last I had something with which I could talk to young women on the telephone without a go-between.

Good things, they say, come in threes. That same summer of Sam's gadget and the Sensicall, I met Debby.

She says that the idea of going out with a deaf man on a blind date almost overwhelmed her, and her roommate had to push her down the stairs to meet me. She says that she could not understand a word I said the entire evening. She says that before I had taken her home she knew she was going to marry me. Go figure.

With the ineffable wisdom of a young deaf bon vivant, I took Debby on that first date to a trendy cocktail lounge where for the entire evening my voice was drowned out by a bush-league Bobby Short at the piano. Debby says she was too frightened to tell me she couldn't hear me, let alone understand me.

But I didn't have any trouble lipreading Deborah Lee Abbott, a pretty young woman with the world's most adorable nose, eyes that still can mesmerize, an extraordinarily vivacious personality, and a sangfroid so unshakable that I had no idea she felt spooked on that blind date. We had been fixed up by an old girlfriend of mine, a fellow senior with Debby at National College of Education in Evanston.

As the pianist crashed out chords a few feet from our table, she told me that just two months earlier she had transferred from William Smith College in Geneva, New York, so that she could get a head start on a career as an elementary school teacher. She was from Marshfield in central Wisconsin, her engineer father owned a construction company, and her mother wrote and published children's stories. And she hoped to follow in her mother's footsteps.

“Ah, a fellow writer. This young lady is worth further investigation,” I thought as I returned her to her hotel late that evening and said good night. A few days later I asked my friend Myron, a fellow copyreader at the
Daily News
, to call her and ask if she was free for dinner that Saturday night. She was sorry, she said, but she had made previous plans.

As Myron hung up, I said resignedly, “Oh, well, it was worth a try,” and muttered something about other fish in the sea.

“Nononono, Henry,” said Myron. “She
really
is interested. Try her again.” Flies don't grow on Myron, who is a truly perceptive human being. He could hear the genuine regret in Debby's voice; her “I'd love to, but” was not a brush-off. A few days later I called her again, and she said yes. I'll save an entire chapter of this book simply by writing that one thing led to
another, and another, and another. Some things are too precious not to keep private.

Debby says that what initially attracted her to me was that I was “interesting,” clearly not one of what she considered a herd of “superficial” young careerists. The deafness, of course, was a novelty, part of the intrigue. In the beginning, she admits, she was a little disconcerted about the consequences of my speech in potentially awkward situations, such as ordering a meal in a noisy restaurant. (I simply have to repeat myself, sometimes with the help of a finger pointing at the item on the menu, until the waiter gets it right.) Once the newness wore off, she realized that we had a good deal in common: similar middle-class backgrounds, similar liberal politics, similar conservative views of family life.

She adds that we shared enough commonality so that she could shrug off, and even chuckle about, the genuinely embarrassing social situations into which my deafness sometimes lands me. One evening early in our courtship, we stopped in with friends at a popular Chicago folk music night spot. Of course, I wasn't interested in folk music, or music of any kind, but, deaf or not, one is smart to go with the social flow, and Debby wanted to hear the featured singer. I have no idea who that was, but she evidently sang like an angel, her heavenly voice warming the poorly heated club and moving the audience almost to tears. Except me.

As the last strains of the music drifted into the rafters and a hush settled over the club, I turned, shivering, to Debby. I had absolutely no idea that the song had ended and, in what must have been a reverent, even sepulchral silence, I loudly and clearly said, “Let's go. My ass is freezing off.”

Ours was the first (and only) romance I have ever carried on via the telephone. You can guess what our conversations with the Sensicall must have been like. In the beginning Debby sent each hard-earned endearment in painstakingly “tapped” Morse, and I'd reply with the usual sweetnesses in voice.

Before long we settled on a simple and quick way to chat: I'd do all the talking (the only time in our relationship I have ever been able to do so), and Debby would reply with “di” for “yes” or “dah” for “no” as appropriate. It was a ridiculously one-sided way to converse, but it sufficed.