What's That Pig Outdoors? (20 page)

What must strangers have thought when they happened upon a pretty young woman trilling “di-di dah-dah” nonsense into the receiver of a
public pay phone? The scene might seem comic, but for me it meant a kind of rebirth.

Two decades ago Sam's box and the Sensicall seemed to me merely conveniences, like refrigerators and washing machines. They were marvelous gadgets, and I thought I'd miss them if they weren't around but I could live without them, as I had all my life. Of course, I missed the point. Modern conveniences are instruments of freedom. A life without something to cool perishables and freshen clothing would be a very different one. We would need to devote a great deal of time and energy to basic survival tasks such as obtaining fresh food and clean clothes. Life without fridges and washers would be tolerable, but our spheres of activity would be severely limited. We would have less freedom to do things that matter—such as communicating with the rest of the world.

Now it seems that, crude as those two early devices were, they meant the beginning of the end of my isolation—isolation from other people. Those who hear cannot imagine how grindingly lonely deafness often can be. A comfortable home can feel like a maximum-security prison if there is no easy means of communication with the outside. This is one important reason why the deaf tend to gravitate toward one another. Just as do the hearing, the deaf need to communicate, to share their thoughts and feelings with others. Only a fellow lifer in the jailhouse of silence understands how important that is to sanity and how difficult it can be to achieve.

Yes, I was living in the world of the hearing, and so long as I was in the presence of family, friends, and fellow workers, I connected. But I needed to enlarge the envelope of my life. As I grew older, like every other young man I needed to create and maintain my own physical and temporal space and from it communicate with the outside.

Partly because I now had a means of doing so, however crude it might be, my romance with Debby was of an entirely new kind. Every evening, not every other week-end, we communicated on the Sensicall and shared the day's events. Three or four times a week I'd call and say, “Have you got a bit of time before I go to work?” and forty-five minutes later, I'd be on her doorstep. Now I could act on impulse, just like everyone else. I didn't have to save my thoughts for days, waiting for the next time we met to spring them upon her.

Because we could now communicate so easily, our relationship was much more like those between hearing people, the kind of liaison I had not truly enjoyed with Rachel and Sharon. On my part at least, those relationships had involved a good deal of impatience. Communications when we were apart were slow and inefficient. When we were together, I was jealous of their time and attention. I wanted to be alone with them, to shut out the world, to have them all to myself. When I was not with them, I was also jealous—of the time and attention I knew other people must be enjoying with them. Including other men—
hearing
men, against whom I felt I could not compete. But now, at twenty-six, I was finally beginning to mature.

Debby's parents spend their summers in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, on the southern shore of Lake Superior. Depending on the lake level, their cabin is twenty to fifty feet from the edge of the cold, clear, clean water. Every morning loons paddle by, and in season Canada geese tarry on their way south. This is wild, remote, lonely, and beautiful country, timbered out by the 1950s and now well into second-stage regrowth. Deer, raccoons, porcupines, and foxes abound, and black bears are returning to the lowlands from exile in the nearby Porcupine Mountains.

That was where I met Betty and Clark Abbott. At first they seemed bemused by the deaf young man their daughter had brought to their summer home. I knew it was up to me to cross the bridge, to meet them halfway, to show them that I was as normal and ordinary a young man as any Debby had dated. Fortunately the task was made easier because we had a good deal to talk about. I have no talent for comfortable small talk, the kind that helps create relationships. For me, communication with strangers is too difficult to waste on social noise.

Betty and Clark are well-informed, politically conscious, and socially concerned people who form reasoned opinions about national and world events. A young newspaperman's kind of people. At first our conversations were halting, but during the long, slow, cool weekend in that quiet cabin on the lake shore, we started to become accustomed to one another's speech.

Betty and I both were voracious readers, and we talked about books. Clark and I exchanged opinions about the growing civil rights movement in the South. To my surprise the Abbotts, who lived smack in the middle of lily-white Republican country in central Wisconsin, were thumpingly in favor of the goals of A. Philip Randolph and Martin Luther King. I also learned that in the early 1950s the Abbotts had been all but ostracized in Marshfield for their vocal opposition to the depredations of Senator Joe McCarthy, the anti-Communist witch-hunter from Wisconsin.

This, I thought, was where Debby got her intelligent, open-minded character, her conscience, her compassion, her selflessness—the things I loved her for. After that Labor Day weekend in the north woods, I began to think that this was a family I might marry into. Shortly before her twenty-second birthday that October, to my surprise as much as hers I popped the question. She quietly put her hand on mine and said yes.

Now began the complicated social maneuvers all young couples must endure to secure the approval of both sets of parents to the union. Mine seemed to think it a good match. They had never expected their son to marry any but a hearing woman, and they liked Debby. The only one in my family who disapproved was my little sister, Debbie, who displayed the normal thirteen-year-old girl's outrage that another woman—let alone one with the same name—would come between her and her beloved big brother. (Yes, the similarity in names did cause a few amusing problems later on. When Debby and I visited my parents while Debbie was still living with them, there was often confusion when a boyfriend called for Debbie, but Debby answered the phone. “Which one?” she'd try to say as quickly as possible. Often she couldn't cut in until the boy had unloaded several embarrassingly intimate endearments upon her.)

Betty Abbott, who had seen us come in from long walks on the Lake Superior shore, our arms entwined affectionately, knew that her youngest daughter had at last found the man with whom she would spend the rest of her life. All mothers have that sort of intuition, or maybe it's just a perceptive fatalism. “I hope you like Henry,” she told Clark, “because I know Debby's going to marry him.” He chuckled and dismissed the idea.

But, as did Spencer Tracy in the classic movie comedy
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?
when Katharine Houghton announced that she was
going to marry Sidney Poitier, Clark Abbott faced another test of character. I wrote him an old-fashioned letter telling him that Debby and I were in love and planned to marry, and hoped that he would give the union his blessing.

Immediately he telephoned his daughter. She wasn't going to marry me in some misguided act of compassion, he declared. Absolutely not. Did she really want to spend the rest of her life with a deaf man? Yes, she did, she said firmly.

It must have been wrenching for Clark. Debby was the baby of the family, the youngest of four children, the last to leave the nest. And for an uncertain existence with a physically handicapped young man? Yes, he was gainfully employed, but what were his prospects for the future?

But like her father, Debby had a strong will of her own, and Clark knew better than to try to turn her against her decision. Difficult as it may have been, Clark gave us his blessing. The Abbotts agreed to announce the engagement at a small party at their house in Marshfield during the Christmas holidays.

While all this was happening, I was utterly unaware of the behind-the-scenes drama, either before or after the die was cast. Clark was too much a gentleman, and too good a student of human nature, to attempt to dissuade me from marrying his daughter. Until Christmas the Abbotts maintained a discreet silence on the matter. So discreet, in fact, that they did not tell their other children that the man Debby was marrying was deaf. Debby's brother Bruce, who worked in the family firm, sensed his father's dismay. One day he looked across the office at his father and said, “Dad, we know something's wrong with Henry. Is he a Negro?”

Both Clark and Betty would have been even more concerned had they known that the divorce rate of deaf-and-hearing marriages, it has been suggested, is close to 90 percent. Such marriages tend to break down for the usual reasons: because of a lack of understanding, communication, and flexibility between the partners. They are almost doomed from the outset because the partners belong to two vastly different cultures, the hearing and the deaf. It's extraordinarily difficult for two such people to bridge the deep cultural gulf between them. The chasm can be as vast as that between, say, a highly educated New York fashion designer with
sophisticated, liberal tastes and a blue-collar small-town manual laborer with an eighth-grade education and old-fashioned views of marriage.

But Debby and I were members of the same culture, the hearing culture. True, in some ways I might be an outsider, but not in those that mattered. We could bridge our differences as well as any other couple— perhaps better than some. For Debby is at the same time flexible and tenacious, with an exquisite sense of compromise yet a determination to hold her ground when she knows she is right. She was and is very skillful at levering a rigid, stubborn fellow like me into appreciating her point of view.

On June 24, 1967, we were married, and we have been together ever since.

In the beginning, my working habits were not exactly ideal for a brandnew marriage. The midnight-to-8 a.m. shift at the
Daily News
meant that I'd come home to our apartment in La Grange Park just after Debby had gone to her fifth-grade classroom at the elementary school up the street. I couldn't fall asleep until after noon, and wouldn't awaken till about 9 p.m., just before she went to bed. We enjoyed the resilience of youth, however, and made the most of our brief evenings as well as the weekend.

Most of the night owls on the graveyard shift on a major metropolitan newspaper were young editors and reporters with too little seniority to choose daytime slots. Others, especially those with children in college, needed the 10 percent night-shift differential in salary. A few were misfits who liked the solitude of the wee hours. And more than one used the shift as an escape from a difficult marriage.

But the work on the Blue Streak, the first of the six editions of the day, was fascinating. Most of the local copy had already been handled by the 4 p.m.-to-midnight shift, and the bulk of the stories that crossed the copy desk consisted of dispatches from the wire services and the Washington and foreign bureaus of the
Daily News.
The night copy chief, Bill Rising, a sandpapery, much-married old curmudgeon, had at first mightily resisted the assignment of a deaf editor to his shift. But he had no choice, and before long he realized that I knew my stuff.

Bill was not very easy to get along with. He hated to have his judgments contradicted, and he was prone to spout superannuated aphorisms of journalism, such as “Never write a headline longer than a newsboy can shout!” It did not seem to have occurred to him that newsboys shouted no more. But if he liked the work of an inexperienced editor, he'd dole out as much responsibility as he thought the youngster could handle.

Soon, on slow nights I'd sit in the slot, handing out copy and checking the work of other editors while Bill snoozed away on the rim. He trusted my judgment enough so that shortly after 5:30 a.m. one day in 1966, when the news came in from police headquarters that eight young nurses had been found murdered in a blood-spattered South Side flat, he told me to brace myself. I'd help handle the story, doing the sidebars while a veteran edited the main piece.