Ordinary Daylight

by Andrew Potok

  “Kids’ shoes,” Kathleen added.

  “Stairs, stairs going down,” I said.

  “Yeah,” a chorus of voices agreed.

  “Fire hydrants.”

  “Dogs.”

  “Low branches.”

  We complained for hours—about talking to an empty chair when someone leaves the room without warning, about being dragged across streets against our will by well-meaning people wanting to help; about being yelled at because we’re presumed deaf as well as blind.

  We were a bedraggled, motley crew, the fifteen of us, grotesque and fascinating. I felt more comfortable that first evening at St. Paul’s than I had felt for a long time, even at home. I belonged here, and I began to love my group. I swore that I’d do anything in the world for any of them. They were my people.

  I couldn’t sleep for hours the first night. I had met my blind demons and they were Dot and Tommy and Ray and Margie. I felt the thrill of beginning love affairs. I wanted to protect them all with my superior vision. As everyone snored in our narrow, squalid space, the women on the other side of a thick fire door wired to an alarm, I thought of their wrecked lives, for the first time in a long time not thinking about my own.

  I tried to fall asleep with music, which I always carried on buses and trains, even on the shortest trips. I felt that my music defined me, reminded me, even at lost, unhinged times, of my identity. Above all, I kept my Beethoven quartets near me, and now I tried to fall asleep on the back of a lilting section of the C-sharp-minor Quartet. Images of Tommy’s left eye wouldn’t leave me. In the loud snores of my dorm mates I interpreted diabetic pathologies no internist had ever dreamed of; with my new friends’ tossing and turning, I feared the last spasms of hypoglycemic convulsions. I awoke later during that first night to hear only the spinning of my empty tape reel, and when I shut it off, all was quiet.

  Our days were very tightly scheduled with classes, meetings, and counseling sessions. We learned cane technique, braille, typing. A shapely young woman from the neighborhood came in once a week to lead the group in yoga. “Hey, Andy,” Little Fred whispered. “She must have some tits.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “I rubbed against her,” he admitted, grinning from ear to ear.

  Miss Freid seemed to enjoy soothing us with her mellifluous voice, exciting us with rumors of her terrific body. Big Fred’s bones creaked as he tried to raise his legs slowly. Dot was game for anything, stretching and straining, laughing at her own gracelessness.

  Felix, a fencing instructor from MIT, came on Friday afternoons just before the start of our weekends. We dressed in padded vests and screened face guards to lunge into the air in front of us, yelling “touché.”

  “It teaches you to locate the source of sound,” Felix told us, “to be sensitive and quick.”

  Little Fred got to be so good at it that Felix took him to MIT one Friday to fence with a blindfolded fencing master. Fred creamed him.

  We were blindfolded for all of our instruction, even Techniques of Daily Living, led by a Brookline housewife who tried to teach us table manners. Mrs. Steinberg’s dainty etiquette provoked us into catapulting lima beans from the ends of our knives. We carried on heated debates about the propriety of using mashed potatoes as a mortar for peas. We poured coffee from a giant urn into our paper cups while Mrs. Steinberg watched, noting those who sneaked a finger into the cup to feel the rising liquid.

  “Do it by weight,” she cajoled, as Rosemary, a proper middle-aged lady from Milton, held her cup under the spigot, the coffee flowing like the cresting tides onto the floor below.

  Mrs. Steinberg gave us long lists of organizations that provided the blind with aids and gimmicks for signing checks, handwriting memorandums, labeling our colored pairs of socks with little tin tabs brailled: bl or bk or br. Through her we learned of the industries providing us with brailled watches, noise-making carpentry levels, brailled knobs and rulers and measuring cups. We practiced dialing the telephone and counting bills and change by feeling the edges of coins, folding the bills in several ways depending on denominations. Mrs. Steinberg teamed up with Miss Kluski, our typing teacher, in an interdisciplinary effort to have us write to the various businesses providing materials for the blind. Over our awkward signatures we typed the same laconic message: “Please send me your catalog. Thank you in advance.”

  In the kitchen we had individual lessons from Stella, an obese young woman who was as lonely as many of us had become. Much to the displeasure of the administration, Stella made friends with the trainees, her fatness being a stigma in the world like our blindness. With her, we tried to identify herbs by smell, though her perfumes, lotions, and deodorants made a musky goulash of rosemary and thyme. We learned to use specialized kitchen equipment, to peel vegetables, to trap a slippery fried egg, to listen to a medium-rare hamburger. I baked a challah, my crowning culinary achievement at St. Paul’s, and when everyone asked for the recipe, I practiced both my braille and typing in a real-life exercise.

  At night, alone on my little cot, plugged into Pharoah Sanders or a Mozart quintet, I wondered how my community back home would ever understand my new pleasures. How would those theoreticians, those woodsy intellectuals, and doyens of progressive education respond to blind Big Fred or the joy of a solo trip to Newton Corner or a neatly eaten meal, no peas rolling down the table, no long red stains down the shirt front.

  The classes we had with Mr. Cristofanetti, an old sculptor, were the most interesting and original of anything taught at St. Paul’s. He himself looked to me like an El Greco, gray bearded, noble, on the edge of ecstasy. With his eyes turned upward, he lived, at least part-time, in a spiritual realm unknown to me. His profound and genuine concern with blindness anchored him, prevented him, I thought, from rising beyond reach. He called his exercises “videation,” the visualization and conceptualization of unseen things. We were asked to focus all our senses on an object or a territory, then to use it and know it, as we might have done with sight. We charted the placement of trees and poles by feeling a kind of sound-shadow on our faces. We climbed over park sculptures to form extravisual impressions of them. Across the street, at the College of the Sacred Heart, where, with him, we were never trespassers, he made us walk blindfolded from one soccer goal to the other, a hundred yards away. Later, as I’d step onto a curb after crossing a tumultuous intersection, I’d thank Cristofanetti for helping me to set my interior gyroscope.

  We studied small raised-line maps of the area and transposed them into full-scale landscapes that became as familiar as they would have been with sight. He spun us in revolving chairs and raced us insanely through the St. Paul’s lobby to teach us that we need never be disoriented. His was an artist’s organization of space, a rage for order from the chaos we inhabited.

  At times, my mind seemed fuller than it had ever been, cataloging empirical clues—the wind, the sun, the time, the overhanging dangers, the textures underfoot, the openings and closings of space, the flow of people and traffic—while constructing a map, a plan, a purpose, and an order. Like painters and sculptors, we organized not only the reality we could feel through the touch of the sun on our foreheads, through the presence of mass or the sound of emptiness, but also the colors and shapes of our dreams now that color and shape existed only in that sphere.

  “Remember color,” Cristofanetti would urge. “Actively, deliberately recall it. Do mental calisthenics to bring back the bright blue sky, a bowl of lemons, limes, and oranges. Otherwise,” he warned, “you’ll lose it forever.”

  Because of him, we didn’t have to settle for just the shrunken world we could reach and touch. As clouds and mountains receded to the realm of memory and trees became the piece of rough bark under our palms, or houses became the step we stumbled over or the doorknob we held in our hands, Cristofanetti urged us to bring the clouds and mountains back, reconstructing with us in our minds’ eyes the roofs and windows of houses, the architectonic shapes of trees. He made blindness
so challenging that I sometimes found myself tingling in anticipation of further proof of my own ability to overcome another obstacle.

  The Center operated by the rules and philosophy of a priest, now dead, named Thomas Carroll, who had dedicated much of his life to the understanding of blindness. Total blindness was the condition the Center staff felt best equipped to handle, but because the arbitrary legal definition of blindness brought them people just over the edge of the 20/200 category, like me, they blindfolded us all, even those in the group whose optic nerves had been severed. This ardor to equalize us overlooked the needs of the partially sighted, who wanted to learn how best to utilize their remaining vision. But St. Paul’s, like the Boston cop who beat the “ersatz” blind man senseless, felt that if you’re going to teach the blind, they damn well better be blind. And so we were asked to wear the black plastic occluders everywhere. They were like fancy ball masks except for the absence of slits to see through.

  My superior vision didn’t seem to be resented by my fellow trainees, but the staff, dedicated as they were to the truly blind—they tolerated light perception—made me feel guilty about seeing. Miss Hennessy, the psychiatric social worker who was virtually in charge of all St. Paul’s activities, made sure I felt like the privileged impostor in a world of blackness and woe.

  “Please get your occluders, Mr. Potok,” Miss Hennessy reminded me several times a day. On mobility lessons, in Newton or Boston, the occluders made perfect sense. Not only did they give me the immense satisfaction of being able to tackle the tumult of congested streets while completely blind, but also, in traffic, my little bit of sight was dangerously distracting. I was safer learning to listen hard than to strain to see the blurred car coming through one of my blind spots. But during the few minutes between classes, strolling leisurely on the grass near the rose-bushes, or even in the insipid ugliness of the linoleum lobby, it seemed preposterous to deny myself the last vestiges of vision, vision I expected to keep for a while longer.

  Once you have reduced everyone to an equal blackness, the next step, according to old Father Carroll, was to allow the grieving process its time and space. Because blindness was considered a death of the eyes, Kubler-Ross—type grieving stages were deemed appropriate, even essential, in our rehabilitation. There were indeed those among us who were severely depressed and who needed time to deal with the depression, anger, shock, or denial; but there were others, like Dot and Tommy, who were dealing mostly with the frustration and inconvenience of blindness.

  Miss Hennessy was in charge of the grieving process. She was driven by her profession’s thirst for underlying causes. Whatever the cause, Miss Hennessy was quick to rationalize its place in our rehabilitation. Our reactions and subsequent adjustment of blindness would be deftly linked to some intimate bit of submerged material that she had pried away from us. Though we were presumably at St. Paul’s to learn the skills necessary to lead independent lives, the blindness was often assumed to be a “presenting problem,” the tip of the iceberg, under which it seemed to us that Miss Hennessy, with the religious fervor of the Inquisitor, was looking for the behavior and history that had provoked God’s wrath in the first place.

  Miss Hennessy seemed sculpted out of polyester resin or epoxy. A sculptor named Gallo had created lifelike full-size figures that I liked very much. Miss Hennessy seemed to me a Gallo sculpture. She seemed to inhabit a face and body mask, carefully composed with black eye pencil, cerise lipstick, and permanently waved jet-black hair. She sometimes wore little gold earrings, which spoke of a tender, yearning woman behind the constructed exterior. I wanted to gently blow into her ears and suck her earlobes, thinking that the whole Miss Hennessy might thus come to life. Her bosom, and it was a single entity, solid as the Green Mountains, was held together by unyielding armor. Nothing protruded; all was fused into one solid form. Even more than her ears, I fancied airing out her breasts, letting them hang loose, taking them to the beach to put color into what I imagined to be white and unhealthy, creased by the snaps and buttons of her protective covering.

  Her office was a monk’s cell located directly to one side of the main entrance, thus giving her a splendid view of the many activities that took place there. She saw us all as severely depressed, and if we acted to contradict her assumptions, we were offering her proof of our denial and had to be moved more forcefully along the craggy path of our rehabilitation. Her God-given calling was to mold us with her consummate professional skills, with her credentials, training, protective jargon, and secret assumptions. She wanted to be the midwife at the birth of the newly socialized blind person, to be that mother duck who is first seen—in our case heard—and forever followed by the hatched ducklings. For that purpose, in weekly individual sessions Miss Hennessy prodded our aching unconscious. She was on the lookout for slips of the tongue, for our areas of uncertainty, as she listened intently for clues betraying what she thought were our real problems underlying blindness.

  “Well, Mr. Potok,” she would start. By the end of the first week, everyone at St. Paul’s was on a first-name basis except Miss Hennessy, who insisted on this professional distancing. “How are things going for you at home?”

  “I haven’t been home much since I’ve been here.”

  “Yes, I know, Mr. Potok. That’s why I ask. Are you staying here over weekends because of troubles at home?”

  How I wanted to share everything with her, to say: listen, Bridget, I feel so desexed, so powerless, so repulsive. Take me in your polyester arms and stroke my limp psyche. “Things are okay,” I would say. “Blindness isn’t easy. . . .”

  “You’re sexually compatible?” she would ask.

  “Like rabbits.”

  “And your daughter, Mr. Potok? You must have some pretty strong feelings about passing the RP on to her.”

  “She’s just having trouble at night now. . . .”

  “Yes, but we know that will change. She’ll be as blind as you. . . .”

  “I know,” I said, feeling weepy in spite of my resolve not to let her get to me. “She still has a long sighted life ahead of her. . . .”

  “Not that long,” Bridget Hennessy said. Just outside her small window a section of the braille class gathered, smoking and enjoying the perfect fall day. Linda, my mobility instructor, had just brought Margie back from a lesson. Everyone was joking and laughing. “You have to deal with your guilt, Mr. Potok,” Miss Hennessy said. “Just because you are educated and probably have some idea of the process of the unconscious, don’t think you are exempt from it. . . .” I wanted to twist her smooth neck, hang her by her rosary beads. “Well, that’s all for today, Mr. Potok. And by the way, Miss Dawson says that you’ve been talking with her about her mother. I think it best if you leave all the therapy to me.”

  My position at St. Paul’s was equivocal. Nobody knew that as well or capitalized on it as much as Miss Hennessy. My background was urbane, privileged, even exotic. Miss Hennessy periodically felt compelled to reestablish her authority, to smash suspected competition. It must have been partly my imagination and partly my own feelings of insecurity on the subject, but I was convinced that she thought it a grave error in judgment for St. Paul’s to have accepted me in the first place, not only because of my residual vision but also because she must have known from experience that it was always irritating to deal with clients who asked too many questions, thought themselves too knowledgeable, and pestered authorities about their rights. Every time Miss Hennessy and I passed in the hall, I thought I detected a faint sardonic smile that said: you’re as manipulable as anyone else as long as you’re here.

  People like me had been a very small minority in all the years of St. Paul’s existence, not because the institution discouraged our attendance but because the privileged blind usually chose to learn blindness skills at home. A banker I know with RP visited St. Paul’s but could not make himself stay. The dinginess, the constant Mantovani on the record player, the notable absence of his kind sent him home, where he hired a
chauffeur and built himself a house with ramps and sliding doors. Some of the privileged blind people I know have hardly felt an interruption in their lives. The menial tasks are done by others, and travel is difficult only for the poor. When a tenured university professor I had met began to lose his sight, another secretary was added to his staff, and even though blindness is never easy, it is certainly easier for those who have money and those who need not change their work.

  At most any time of the day, sitting in the lobby between classes, I could expect to see a teary, flustered trainee bolt out of Miss Hennessy’s office, having just painfully disclosed some delicate information about early masturbatory habits and now in mortal fear that it would become public knowledge. In staff meetings, in fact, she would insist on entering into our files all the damaging material she elicited from us about our politics, drinking habits, and sex lives. These files were open for all the staff to see, as well as our rehabilitation counselors back home whose funds had enabled us to attend St. Paul’s. Because, much to Miss Hennessy’s horror, I had made friends among some of the staff, I was sometimes told the content of my own file, in which there appeared, among many other things, a record of the time I tacked an antiwar poster to the wall of the staff room. After much discussion, and over Miss Hennessy’s protests, it was allowed to remain because it was “good for his rehabilitation.”

  Once a week, we were required to meet as a whole group with Miss Hennessy and a consulting psychiatrist named Dr. Gruber. We met in the musty basement where six large Formica-topped tables were pushed together to make one vast white area around which our chairs were pinned in place, pressed against the walls. It was a rather ingenious way of capturing fifteen unwilling blind analysands.

  We straggled into these evening sessions like kids to chapel, the last ones having to sit next to Miss Hennessy or Dr. Gruber. The two leaders entered together, after most of us were settled. They sat down, spread their notebooks and papers, looked around for signs of mood, and waited. We always started with a long silence, sometimes ten minutes’ worth, by my watch, disturbed only by squirming and tortured clearing of throats. Miss Hennessy sat very straight, while Dr. Gruber, an ardent emigré from Budapest, slumped in his chair, his hair slightly mussed, trying to look relaxed. He seemed as relaxed as a banker meeting with the Palestine Liberation Organization.