What's That Pig Outdoors?

by Henry Kisor

  Meanwhile, Mother and Dad had found private speech lessons for me at the Institute for Language Disorders at Northwestern University, a few blocks from our home. For several months I had lessons with an elderly couple famous for their work with deaf babies in England. The Ewings—later Sir Alexander and Lady Irene—and I got along very well, and they improved my speech markedly. They even, quite inadvertently, gave me my first instruction in the difference between British and American English.

  While testing my vocabulary by showing me pictures of objects and asking me to name them, the Ewings displayed a drawing of a familiar item of feminine appurtenance. “Pocketbook,” I said confidently. “No, Hank, that’s a purse,” they replied. “Pocketbook,” I insisted. To me and my friends, a purse was a small bag with a clasp for holding coins. It could be carried inside a women’s pocketbook. “Purse,” they countered. What strange ideas these British people had! Meanwhile, the Ewings shook their heads and smiled as they wrote in their notebooks. Doubtless the deaf American child had confused a purse with a paperbound novel and did not want to admit his error.

  Darn right I didn’t. I knew they didn’t believe me, and I seethed. When they brought me out to Mother after the session, I immediately grabbed her pocketbook. “What’s this?” I demanded. “It’s a pocketbook, isn’t it?” “Yes, honey,” she replied indulgently. I was triumphant. I doubt that the Ewings heard the exchange, for they neither apologized to me nor acknowledged Mother’s confirmation. To me this was not a trivial matter, a simple bruising of a child’s pride. Inconsequential and even irrelevant as it may seem, it was the first of many disagreements I would have with authorities in the field of deaf education. (Not that I was always right, as I was in this case!)

  My experience with the Ewings led to an episode in which one matter was settled and another raised. Mother recalls that our immediate neighbors insisted, as did many people, that I must have retained some hearing because I seemed, in their words, “so normal and responsive.” So did the Ewings, who mistook my skill at anticipating and guessing their statements for evidence that I must have a great deal of residual hearing. They decided that my hearing should be extensively tested.

  And so it was, by the head of the institute at Northwestern himself. Helmer Myklebust was a renowned authority in the field of deaf education. For six solid hours one spring day, he subjected me to a battery of auditory tests, carefully designed to ensure that there would be no visual cues. A few years before, I had mistaken sympathetic vibrations of the eardrum for genuine hearing. I had also inadvertently fooled testers when they turned up the dials and asked, seemingly out of my line of sight, if I could hear the tone and I replied, “No.” I simply had (and still have) excellent peripheral vision, and had guessed correctly when I saw the movements of the tester’s lips far to my left. What else would they say but “Do you hear anything?” I had no intention of deceiving anybody—I just thought I was being a nice, cooperative little boy.

  Finally, late in the afternoon, as ants of impatience gnawed away at me, Myklebust admitted the truth. I had no measurable hearing. I was deaf. Totally and completely. Not slightly, partially, or profoundly, or hard-ofhearing, or any of the other degrees of and euphemisms for hearing loss. At last the matter was settled.

  But Myklebust, who had made his name as a psychologist of the deaf, also declared that I was “tense” and “hostile,” and needed some psychological therapy. Dad, who had taken me to Northwestern and had stayed there for the entire six-hour session, lost his temper. “Of course the kid is tense!” he said. “Any normal child would be tense if he’d been asked all day to do something he can’t do!” And with that he swept me out of the building. I would not return to it for more than a decade.

  On separate levels both Dad and Myklebust probably were right. A sixhour battery of tests is bound to try a child’s patience and affect the results. Dad knew that outside the psychologist’s laboratory I functioned well, in all ways a happy nine-year-old child growing up in a limitless world. Had Myklebust been out in the field for weeks, observing my normal everyday interactions with hearing adults and children, perhaps he would have come to different conclusions, ones that acknowledged that I perhaps displayed a larger potential for success in the hearing world than most deaf children. It’s not always easy for social scientists to recognize exceptions to the rules they formulate, especially if the data for those rules come entirely from testing in the laboratory. In those situations, “counseling” might do more harm than good. In 1949, I am certain, it might have proven more a hindrance than a help. A few years later, perhaps not. For a seed of truth was buried in Myklebust’s findings, a seed that eventually would sprout and take root.

  In any event, Mother and Dad by this time had no doubt that they had chosen the right path for me. I was doing well at Orrington School, keeping abreast of, if not a little ahead of, most of my classmates in all subjects— even, of all things, drama—and had built up a large new circle of friends. An emblematic memory of the time comes from an October day in 1951 when I walked out of school to see a knot of boys gabbling excitedly around a classmate with a portable radio. One of my friends peeled away from the group and dashed over to me. He joyfully punched my shoulder. “The Giants won the pennant!” he cried. “Bobby Thomson hit a homer in the last of the ninth!” I have never been certain whether Steve wanted to be sure his deaf friend knew what had happened or whether he simply was sharing momentous news with the nearest warm body. I like to think it was the latter: that I was just another kid in the schoolyard.

  Certainly I was doing everything the other youngsters were, even taking lessons on musical instruments. My parents thought musical instruction might benefit my speech, even if they weren’t quite certain exactly how. They didn’t force me into it, as so many reluctant hearing children are; they simply asked if I was interested, and I eagerly said yes, because I had the normal eleven-year-old’s enthusiasm for new experiences.

  Mother and Dad paid the small fee for private after-school lessons with the school’s instrumental teacher, who manfully tried to guide me in what must have been several extraordinarily painful—for him—sessions with the trumpet. I understood the broad notion of a musical note: it was a certain frequency of vibration. I had no idea, however, how to produce it, let alone when. I never could synchronize the vibrations of my lips on the mouthpiece with the fingering of the valves. Occasionally, quite by accident, I’d hit upon some semblance of a note, and the teacher would praise me for doing so. But I never could repeat the note.

  Stubbornly I kept on, session after session, the teacher sitting beside me sweating as profusely as I was, marking the proper valve fingering on the sheet music before me and gritting his teeth over the sounds I produced. To call those sounds off-key was probably to flatter them. Finally I admitted defeat. “Do you think I should keep on doing this?” I asked the teacher in frustration. “I don’t want to.” Immediately he smiled, sighed with relief, and gently took the trumpet from my hands. For weeks he must have been waiting for me to say those words.

  At the time I didn’t think my lack of success all that unusual. Some of my friends had also tried, and failed, with musical instruments. Big deal. So we weren’t cut out for that sort of thing. Musical illiteracy was simply another characteristic we shared. They were tone deaf, and I was deaf deaf. If there was a difference, the consequences were the same.

  In other ways we shared success. Most of the boys in my fifth-grade class joined the Evanston YMCA, which had an excellent afternoon program for boys as well as a summer camp in Michigan. The Y staff was as open-minded as anyone could be about deaf children in their programs, and they were also willing, at Mother and Dad’s behest, to allow me to seek my own level. Two or three times a week, we fifth-graders would take a bus downtown after school for swimming lessons.

  In the summers some of us took the bus to Camp Echo, which the Y operated in the woods near Fremont, Michigan. Though some of the boys were filled with the usual ten-year
-old’s horror at being separated from his parents for the first time, I wasn’t. Those summer visits with my grandparents had accustomed me to being away from home. Like a grizzled old veteran lecturing a bunch of recruits, I airily told my cabin mates that their homesickness wouldn’t last, that camp was terrific and c’mon, let’s have some fun.

  At camp and at the Y my friend Sam and I became quite proficient in the pool and were asked to join the Y’s age-group team, he as a backstroker and I as a freestyler. In the beginning, because I couldn’t hear the starting gun, I swam only on relays. But since I was a stronger swimmer than most—partly because I had entered puberty a bit earlier than my friends and was putting on muscle—Dad and the coach thought I might also excel in individual events if only I could get a good start. They tried placing me in the lane closest to the starter so that I could feel the vibrations of his pistol. The results were inconsistent. In a small, closed-in pool, I could sometimes feel on my skin the crack of the .22 pistol if it was a particularly loud one. Most starter’s guns, however, didn’t produce vibrations strong enough to register on me.

  So I learned to keep one eye on the left hand of the swimmer to my right. As soon as it moved, off I’d go. Of course, there was a noticeable delay in my start, but with time and practice Dad and the coach helped me get the lapse down to two-tenths of a second or so. Today, when winning margins are often measured in hundredths of a second, that might not seem like much help. But in the schoolboy competition of the 1950s, it was plenty. Soon I stood out from the crowd as a swimmer and began to win my share of medals in regional age-group competitions.

  It wasn’t long before my rivals learned that they could make me falsestart by twitching their hands as we go into the “set” position. On a false start, the starter would fire his pistol a second and a third time to halt the swimmers before they’d got more than a few yards down the pool. Whenever that happened, one of my teammates had to jump into the pool to grab me before I worked up a head of steam. Three false starts and a swimmer was disqualified. The officials, however, quickly sized up the situation and announced that anyone who tried to make me false-start would himself be banished from the event.

  In the typical American family unit of the 1940s and 1950s, the mother was the dominant figure at home while the father went off to work, and the Kisor household was no different. Mother took on the major responsibility for my speech and lipreading, and for persuading dubious educators to take a chance with a deaf child. We were close and still are, perhaps more so than other mothers and sons, because she invested so much time, energy, and emotion in the upbringing of her deaf son.

  Mother is of a type well known, and much disliked, by educators of the deaf: one who, they say, refuses to accept the reality that her child is deaf and will not allow her child to accept his deafness. This sort of mother, they contend, is aggressive, demanding, pushy, certain of her position, contemptuous of others, and absolutely unreasonable. Not only will her child fail to live up to her absurdly high expectations; the emotional stresses that ensue are almost certain to cause personality disorders.

  That this sometimes happens I have no doubt; I have met more than one troubled deaf adult who is a product of this scenario. But it did not occur at our house. Mother wisely did all her pushing and shoving and wrangling behind the scenes, keeping her son utterly unaware of it. Rather than force me to do things that I could not do, she simply created a large space in which I could try my luck, and if my efforts did not work, go on to something else. She allowed me to be independent. She gave me room to learn how to balance success against failure and accept the results with equanimity.

  She accepted the reality that I could not hear. What she refused to accept was the concept of deafness held by most of the educators she met: that a deaf child should not be too ambitious, because the world will not allow him to achieve his goals, and that one must be realistic and guide him down paths of lesser resistance so that a simpler and easier life will allow him to be happy. In short, Mother refused to allow anyone else to set my limits. Only I, and I alone, could find and define them. For that wisdom I am deeply grateful.

  I owe Dad just as much, for he believed as strongly as Mother did in his deaf son’s potential. Moreover, he was never a distant, remote figure, as were so many fathers of the time. Almost every spring and summer evening we’d play catch out front, even when I grew older and my fastball wilder, smokier, and more painful to catch. He’d coach third base for my Y club’s softball games and volunteer as a timer at the endless swimming meets. He seemed to be everywhere.

  He was always there even for my friends. In our early teens, my best friend, Sam Williamson, bit off a little more than he could chew when he bought a kit for a full-sized, fourteen-foot plywood Sailfish sailboat. His father, competent with tools but a busy professor at work on an academic project, thought the best way to help Sam fit a certain stubborn part into the boat was to enlist the skills of my father. Dad came to the rescue and helped Sam solve the problem. As I recall, it looked as if it had been done by a professional.

  One of Dad’s most important legacies to me has been a deep appreciation for a job done right, with skill and exquisite, painstaking care. We spent many hours together in the basement building models and furniture and repairing bicycles and washing machines. Patiently he instructed me in the various uses of an awl and a spokeshave, a chisel and a hacksaw, a plunger and a pipe wrench. The things we made always looked expertly done, not the clumsy products of a do-it-yourselfer.

  He taught me, also, to make no little plans—especially when it came to home improvement. There was nothing we could not do so long as we had the proper tools, materials, and determination. Together we converted a back pantry into a powder room, brazing copper pipe and installing a heavy toilet. I was the one who scurried into the musty, cobwebby crawl space underneath the old pantry with the brazing torch; Dad, a six-footer, was just too big. I was so proud to be trusted with that important task that I momentarily lost my fear of spiders.

  When we were very young, Buck and I were siblings of hackneyed normalcy. Like brothers everywhere, we battled mightily. I still remember a particularly painful whaling Mother gave me when I was about four and he eight, after l resentfully laid a Louisville Slugger across his shins with all my strength. I have no recollection what the dispute was about, nor does he.

  But as we grew older, Buck took a close interest in his little brother’s welfare. For three years he was the counselor of my Y club. Like Mother and Dad, he believed in testing my capabilities, discarding those activities that seemed fruitless and encouraging those that seemed promising. He was a swimmer, too, and a counselor at Camp Echo. More than most little brothers, I followed in his footsteps. They were large ones, full of a loving encouragement that is rare among siblings.

  My sister Debbie, thirteen years my junior, had yet to come along, and when she did, she would always be too young to have the sort of impact on my life that Buck had. Nonetheless, even as a very small child she made a difference—in an endearing sort of way. But I am getting ahead of my story.

  As I entered junior high, there were two areas of endeavor in which I was superior to most of my compatriots: reading and swimming. I felt strong and confident of my place in the scheme of things. Mother and Dad expected to have to battle the school authorities so that I could attend Haven Junior High with my friends near our house instead of Nichols Junior High with the other deaf children miles away on the south side of Evanston. But the officials assented, for my language development had progressed to a point where I could no longer be scored on standardized junior high reading tests. What had they to lose? Besides, Haven had an excellent speech teacher—not a teacher of the deaf, but what was then called a “speech correctionist.”

  Then I entered adolescence, that inescapable and implacable condition that tests the confidence of every youngster on earth.

  5

  Conventional wisdom holds that deaf youngsters’ knowledge of sex lags far b
ehind that of their hearing peers, simply because their shortcomings of language prevent them from acquiring information easily. Nonetheless, I entered eighth grade as learned, and as ignorant, about sex as any other thirteen-year-old of my acquaintance. When I was eleven Mother and Dad had given me a facts-of-life book for prepubescents, something that seemed to me better suited to a six-year-old with its irrelevant talk of pollen and eggs and its childish pictures of tadpoles and mice.

  Like all my friends, I had obtained more scholarly instruction in the classroom of the gutter. A slightly older boy had informed me, in conspiratorial whispers, of the basic mechanics of the sexual act, and one my own age had introduced me to the pleasures of what then was called self-abuse. Moreover, I had discovered my parents’ marriage manual in their bottom drawer.

  Ideal Marriage was a classic of ornamental Victorian obfuscation by a Dr. T. H. Van de Velde, who never used one Anglo-Saxon word where three Latinate equivalents would do. I was fascinated by him, and appalled. He used such highfalutin terms as “intromission” and “coitus” and “phallus,” forcing me, with almost every paragraph, to run downstairs to the living room to consult the big dictionary. His actual descriptions of “intercourse,” a word he seems to have tried hard to avoid, taught me for the first time about irony, although it would be years before I came across the literary term.