Train Go Sorry

by Leah Hager Cohen

  What really motivated me to accept the staff position at La Guardia was the conviction that my solitude as a freelancer was professionally irresponsible. I had learned a great deal from deaf clients over the past two months, but it seemed an impropriety to make them shoulder the burden of my professional development. At La Guardia I would have a proper mentor: the coordinator of interpreting services, Bonnie Singer.

  Working with Bonnie, admiring the grace with which she made sense of things, her apparently infinite ability to bring clarity between people, I relearned some of my early ideas about interpreting. I also learned that the frustration and self-deprecation that plagued me as a beginning interpreter were more or less endemic to the profession, for Bonnie, who held top RID certification, was perfectly forthcoming about her own failings and the dissatisfaction she still sometimes felt with her performance.

  For every language except sign language, the ideal interpreting situation has the interpreter working in one direction only: interpreting into the mother tongue. At the United Nations, for example, no matter how proficient interpreters may be in their second or third or fourth language, they only interpret from these languages into their first language, the reason being that the most authentic and faithful interpretation can be rendered only by a native speaker. ASL interpreters are the only interpreters in the world who regularly, of necessity, interpret from their native language into one learned later in life (the possible exception being hearing children of deaf parents). Coming into contact with Bonnie and other interpreters at La Guardia, I learned that a certain awkwardness with ASL never entirely dissipates.

  Still, I made strides. From Bonnie I learned about lag time. Rather than spewing signs directly on the heels of the spoken message, I learned to pause and trust my short-term memory while I listened to enough of the message to grasp the larger intent, so that when I did begin signing, I stayed truer to meaning than if I had scrambled to produce something more nearly verbatim. I increased my ASL vocabulary so that I had more choices to select from, to produce the right nuance. I learned to be less literal in my voicing so that the words I spoke rang more naturally in English.

  At La Guardia I grew to feel comfortable with myself as an adequate interpreter in many situations. I no longer thought so much about political implications. What had been insurmountable in theory turned out to be moot in practice; polemics aside, when a situation requires an interpreter, it makes sense to provide that service as best you can. And I liked interpreting. I enjoyed the challenge, enjoyed thinking about language, making connections between the aural and the manual.

  But I left my job there to go back to school the following fall. I knew I could never make interpreting my life’s work. I couldn’t bear the constant frustration of entering people’s lives, feeling their private sorrows and confusion and rage pass through me in the form of language, yet remaining helpless, forbidden to interact, weightless as a ghost. Worse still was the frustration of being unseen, uncounted, as I performed my task.

  The February after I was hired at La Guardia, exactly two years after I had gone to Alec for tutoring, I went to visit him for the first time in months. We rarely saw each other anymore, but we had remained friends, and I dropped by his apartment one afternoon to chat. He had just brought two glasses of water into the usual comfortable mess of his living room and was fumbling around for a pack of cigarettes when a buzzer sounded and the light bulb in the corner lamp flashed. He shot me a quizzical look and went to the door. There stood a very tall woman with lots of earrings and a purple knapsack.

  “Hello! Yes, I got a note from you under the door this morning. It was a surprise,” Alec voiced.

  “Er . . . I think I can understand if you . . . it takes me a little while.” The woman grinned hesitantly; she had a German accent.

  Alec called me over. “Do you want to interpret?”

  “Sure.” We both knew they could have managed without me, but the woman’s accent and relative unfamiliarity with English would have made it especially difficult; since I happened to be there, it made sense for me to expedite their conversation.

  The woman turned out to be someone Alec had met during his European travels a few years back. Her name was Sabine. She was in town for two days on her way down to Central America. She had kept his address and decided to look him up.

  “Well, come in,” he said. We made our way back into the living room, cleared an island in the sea of Alec-paraphernalia, and sat.

  For the next three hours, I interpreted for Alec and Sabine. They smoked cigarettes and talked about travel and German politics. After the first two hours I got a little fed up with being a nonentity and tried to interject a comment or question every now and then, at which point Alec would frown at me and ask, “Who’s saying that, you or her?” because of course I was signing everything Sabine said as well as my own remarks. So I gave up and went back to just interpreting, and by the time their visit wound down it was time for me to leave, too.

  Outside, the afternoon was already dark, the dead end of winter. I headed for the subway with the same odd detachment I used to feel when freelancing. I knew I had just done a good job. Three hours is a long time to interpret with no breaks. When Alec had asked whether I would interpret, I had been flattered, had felt sort of proud and important to be his link. But at bottom, that was the trouble with interpreting.

  I had always thought that interpreting might be my ticket into the deaf community, the logical way in which my adult self could belong. But it wasn’t my self that was engaged. As an interpreter, I’m not really being with deaf people. I do not think there is any way for me to recover the relationship with deaf people I felt as a child. I am a hearing adult. English is my language. I belong to hearing culture.

  I still interpret on occasion.

  17

  Long Goodbye

  Oscar doesn’t tell people that he thinks of leaving Lexington. The funny thing is, he never planned to be there in the first place. It just sort of happened.

  When he was growing up in the Bronx, it never occurred to him that deafness could be any kind of career choice. Deafness was his parents and their friends and their clubs and their parties, a tapestry so familiar that he was nearly incapable of seeing it. Working with deaf people was nothing he ever considered, much less dreamed of.

  After high school he halfheartedly meandered into Hunter College with the vague notion of maybe becoming a gym teacher. He wound up teaching science for a year at a junior high school in the Morissania section of the east Bronx, then heard about a master’s degree program at Columbia University’s Teachers College that trained teachers of the deaf. Tuition was free; the program even included a stipend to cover expenses. Figuring that he would make a reasonable candidate, he applied and enrolled. All of the student teaching took place at Lexington, which subsequently hired several of the graduates. In this fairly nondeliberate fashion, Oscar found himself, at age twenty-five, employed by his father’s alma mater.

  Now, on a spring afternoon twenty-six years later, he has been invited to appear before a ring of students who wish to interview him, as their superintendent, in their deaf studies class. And to the students, who know nothing of the roundabout path that led him to this position or of the increasingly insistent tug he feels to leave, his name might as well be Mr. Lexington.

  They are an energetic lot, these five high school prefreshmen, agitated and mildly aghast at the presence of such a distinguished visitor in their classroom, which is really a fraction of a classroom, a thin quadrant behind a rickety wooden partition. Oscar appears formidably large in this constricted space, wrapped behind the spatulate arm of a desk-chair, the dark legs of his trousers extending well into the ring of inquisitors, who manage to give the impression of hopping from foot to foot while remaining in their seats.

  “What’s your sport?” comes the first question—apropos of nothing, yet bearing a certain studied urbanity—from the boy on Oscar’s left.

  Oscar levels an equal
ly debonair gaze at the student before responding somewhat drily, “I’m the superintendent; that’s my sport.”

  The field of deafness seems to grow more complicated daily, with the emergence of new goals, new rules and stratagems, the continuing distillation of multiple opposing factions. Even within Lexington, some of the political sparring has truly taken on the pettier aspects of sport, and of this Oscar is contemptuous. Many of the current board disputes are unrelated to educational issues—they seem to be about little more than power for power’s sake—and he resents the way these contests consume increasing amounts of his time.

  This interview with the deaf studies class, however, is well removed from all those troubles, and Oscar makes an effort to shake his mind free, to devote himself entirely to these five students for the next half-hour. The location is a help, since this is the most makeshift classroom in the school, wedged into a hidden corner of the uppermost floor. It can be reached only by going through another classroom, and is strikingly unkempt, littered with half-dismantled collages and empty tissue boxes. Clearly, the chalkboard has not been washed in ages. It is perhaps the spot where one would least expect to find the superintendent, and gradually Oscar relaxes, submitting himself with genuine pleasure to the questions of the class.

  The deaf studies curriculum concentrates heavily on selfidentity and feelings about deafness. Students enter Lexington’s high school with diverse attitudes about their own deafness and deaf people in general. Part of the class entails interviewing guests—mainly deaf staff members—to learn about their experiences growing up. In this way, the students are exposed to a host of role models, different from one another in terms of philosophy, mode of communication, and life choices but all successful deaf adults.

  Oscar, obviously, is an exception. But if the students mind that he is hearing, they don’t show it. They quiz him about the history of Lexington and find out that he used to be the basketball coach, a long time ago, at the old school in Manhattan. They get him talking about the Lexington Avenue building, which, he explains, didn’t have a gym, only a courtyard. (This triggers a brief spat among the students over the proper sign for courtyard.)

  “I remember at the old school,” Oscar continues peacefully when their quarreling has subsided, ”after lunch, going outside and playing basketball with the boys. Sometimes it would be snowing, and we would still play! It was a lot of fun.” And then, reminiscently, ”My father used to play on the Lexington team.”

  The students sit quite still for a moment, eyes lingering on Oscar as if straining to make out an afterimage of his signs. Then they toss sideways glances at one another: Did he say father?

  One boy gets up the nerve to ask. “How . . . ?”

  And Oscar puts the question back to him: “How?”

  His face drenched with skepticism, the boy makes the sign in slow disbelief, the side of his right index finger describing an arc from mouth to ear. “Deaf?”

  Oscar nods. “My father was deaf. And he was a student at Lexington School.”

  The students give each other little surreptitious whacks, registering the profundity of this piece of information. It makes them queerly shy; they become skittish for a moment, silly, whack each other back. They look faintly pink, as though someone had just delivered them a compliment.

  Oscar glances at his watch. It is time for him to go back to his office, and already his thoughts are returning, like haggard, dutiful soldiers, to the political strife that usurps more and more of his time. He wishes there were a way simply to do his job, to concentrate his attention on the students.

  But he is so deeply embroiled that to extricate himself would probably require leaving the field altogether. This he cannot bring himself to do, not just yet, anyway, with so much at stake in the world of deaf education. Of course (and he acknowledges this with a grim jolt), if the antagonism between the school and center boards continues to escalate at its present rate, and if certain center board members have their way, he may be relieved of having to make such a decision.

  In 1983, Lexington School for the Deaf restructured itself, splitting into distinct agencies, or affiliates—the school, the Hearing and Speech Center, the Center for Mental Health Services, and the Research and Training Division—and creating an umbrella organization, the Lexington Center, to govern the whole. Each affiliate was to have its own board, whose members would serve as well on the huge center board. The center board would also have a core of about ten center-board-only members.

  It seemed an excellent idea, a way to broaden and strengthen the services that Lexington could provide to the larger community, and in many respects this proved to be true. But from the restructuring there also arose conflicts. Most of these have involved tension between the center board and the school board.

  Oscar had just become superintendent when the changes were made. During the next several years, he played a significant role in recruiting the new members of the school board. The tension, then, exists largely between what might be perceived as “Oscar’s group” and the center board.

  It is difficult to pinpoint the exact nature of the tension, which in turn makes the tension difficult to assuage. If it were brought on by concrete pedagogical differences, for instance, it might be possible to communicate in specific terms and reach some accord, or compromise, or at least mutual understanding. If it were brought on by any concrete differences, resolution might be possible. Instead, the tension seems wrought by more abstract matters: issues of power, domain, and control.

  This spring the four-year term of Lexington Center’s current board president, Dr. Carol Reich, will come to an end. Dr. Reich is the first president in Lexington’s 125-year history who is not a white, hearing male. She has issued a statement to the mostly white, hearing, male board urging them to choose a deaf person to succeed her. The school board has officially endorsed her suggestion; the center board has not. This has become the latest in a series of instances in which the school board is perceived to be representing an affront to the status quo.

  The animosity between the boards is intensifying. Within a year, the center board will have executed a coup, dismantling all the affiliate boards, including the school board, and subsuming all the members into one massive, fifty-five-member central board, thereby diluting the individual voices that sounded in powerful dissonance from the school board. Once Oscar was able to look on the board troubles as an unfortunate but peripheral part of his job. Lately, they have dominated it. And in the past few months he has heard strong rumors that members of the center board would like to see him removed. Even in the midst of all this unrest, he appreciates the irony in that.

  At schools for the deaf around the country, hearing administrators are feeling vulnerable in their jobs, aware that deaf activists would like to see the positions held by deaf people. At Lexington, Oscar feels vulnerable as well, but in his case the immediate threat comes not from the deaf community, in which he has dwelt comfortably since birth, but from the old ranks of hearing authorities, who are trying to maintain their patronage in changing times.

  “Will Deaf Clubs Survive Modern Times? How Is the Deaf Community Changing?” This is the theme of Lexington’s eighth annual forum for leaders in the deaf community. Oscar has been organizing these forums since he became superintendent. Past topics have included racism, legislation, and technology and their effects on the deaf community. Perhaps none has seemed as devastatingly important as this year’s.

  The deaf community has come to a peculiar crossroads. On one hand, deaf culture may never have been stronger or more appreciated than it is today. On the other hand, it may never reach these heights again, as there are now indications on many different fronts that despite (indeed, partly because of) all the gains in recent years—the legislation, the media attention, the technological advances, the civil rights advances—deaf culture may be slipping into decline. It is losing its critical mass.

  In 1963 and 1964, an epidemic of rubella, or German measles, infected people
all over the United States. When the virus infects a woman in her first trimester of pregnancy, it can cause congenital defects in her baby. Thus an unusually high number of deaf children were born in the mid-1960s. Within the field, this swell in the deaf population is commonly referred to as the “rubella bulge.” Around the same time, the research that proved ASL to be a legitimate language was becoming widely acknowledged and accepted. This began to affect educational philosophy. It also provided an important tool for deaf people in their demands for increased respect, recognition, and rights.

  In the early 1970s, a series of lawsuits and acts of Congress granted deaf people new rights to access to public facilities. These culminated in 1975 with the passage of Public Law 94-142, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act. Within the deaf community, people printed up buttons that showed, beneath the legend “P.L. 94-142,” two hands, palms down, fingertips meeting: the sign for equal.

  By the mid-1980s, deaf people had gained considerable grassroots political power. In 1988, the Deaf President Now movement achieved its dramatic and well-publicized victory at Gallaudet. A year after that, five thousand people from deaf communities around the world gathered at Gallaudet for an international congress called the Deaf Way. And one year after that, Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The most sweeping legislation affecting deaf people to date, ADA ensures them the same protection from discrimination that ethnic minorities already have.

  Deafness began to enter the realm of public consciousness as never before. Mark Medoff’s play about deafness, Children of a Lesser God, became a hit on Broadway; its star, Phyllis Frelich, became the first deaf actor to receive a Tony Award. In 1987, the deaf actor Marlee Matlin received an Oscar for performing the same role in the movie version, and millions of television viewers around the world watched her sign her acceptance speech. Deaf actors appeared more regularly on television, in guest spots on weekly series and in TV movies such as the award-winning Love Is Never Silent-, in the fall of 1991, Reasonable Doubts became the first series to star a deaf actor.