What's That Pig Outdoors?

by Henry Kisor

  And for the first time in my young manhood, I fell in love, into the kind of all-consuming grand passion that falls just short of obsession. In high school and the first two years at Trinity I had continued to date, even to the point of “going steady” once or twice, but my relationships with the opposite sex had remained callow. Girls were either good buddies or objects of lust.

  This was, after all, the Eisenhower Age, an era that still prized virginity. Young women armored themselves before dates, wearing heavy panty girdles below and cantilevered, hard-plastic constructions called “Merry Widows” above. We young men boasted about our sexual activities in baseball cliches. “First base” was, of course, a kiss. “Second base” was those treasures guarded by the Merry Widows. “Home runs” were rare and much lied about. Like most, I had been a low-average spray hitter occasionally lucky enough to stretch a single into a double.

  Rachel was the same age—twenty—and a student at Tufts University near Boston, three hours east of Hartford. We had met the summer between our sophomore and junior years at Camp Echo. I had been drawn instantly to this extraordinary girl from Glencoe, a wealthy North Shore suburb. She was tall and pretty, with a warm, friendly manner, a dimpled smile that could disarm a gunman, and a Junoesque body. She was also one of the most dynamic people I had ever met. Not only could she hold her own in free-for-alls about Heidegger or Manet, but she was also a gifted dancer who often starred in musicals at Tufts, as well as a class officer and an accomplished student.

  How Rachel was able to juggle all these things and carry on a heavy weekend relationship with a student at another college I’ll never quite know. But we managed to see each other almost every weekend, thanks to buses between Hartford and Boston and the extraordinary generosity of a fraternity brother and roommate, Sam Curtis, who was not averse to loaning a good friend the keys to his brand-new Volkswagen.

  That autumn was a classical college idyll, with fraternity parties, football weekends, and passionate nights in off-campus motels. It was one of the happiest times of my young life. The problems of deafness seemed irrelevant, a thing of the past. Rachel and I were, in the romantic conceit of the young, a single entity, each half of which could anticipate the every feeling and thought of the other.

  First passions always end painfully, and mine was no different. At some point in our relationship, I think, Rachel began to realize that the mysterious, miraculous abilities of the deaf young man with whom she was smitten were in truth not all that extraordinary. He had genuine limitations. He did not have the social polish of the other young men she knew. With her friends and family he was shy, awkward, and uncommunicative. Nothing in his manner suggested that he might be bound for the boardroom, to become a captain of industry who could provide a comfortable life.

  Rachel came from a well-to-do family, one that measured success by income and social position. I had neither of those, nor aspirations in those directions—or any other, for that matter. At twenty I was not mature enough to know what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. One day I might talk about attending law school, the next about studying archaeology, the next about going immediately to work as an insurance man. Or maybe I might become a poet. I was no model of stability.

  Rachel’s father, the founder and president of a successful manufacturing company, could not stand me, and I cannot blame him. I couldn’t lipread him easily and, perhaps more unconsciously than consciously, avoided talking to him whenever I visited Rachel’s house. Evasiveness is hardly a desirable attribute in the character of a prospective son-in-law— especially one who seemed never to have anything interesting to say, let alone a useful future. Besides, they were Jewish and I an unchurched Protestant—and in those days, religious differences were much more important to the parents of young people than they are today.

  If Rachel’s mother, however, harbored negative feelings about the young man who was so clearly crazy about her daughter, she kept them well hidden. She was kindly and considerate toward me, and we had many long talks while I waited for Rachel to come downstairs to go out on a date with me. I could see that Rachel had inherited not only her father’s drive but also her mother’s warm curiosity.

  Matters came to a head at the end of the summer between our junior and senior years. Rachel and her family—including her two younger sisters—headed for Europe. For the first time in six years, I did not return to Camp Echo. I wanted to do something different, to enjoy new experiences. Sam Curtis and I decided to drive west, to earn money as fruit and vegetable pickers in the San Joaquin Valley of California. My parents were dismayed, but theirs was a quiet and unexpressed disapproval, because they knew that if I was to grow into an independent adult, I needed to make mistakes and learn from them.

  As they expected, Sam and I didn’t pick a single bean, but we enjoyed ourselves all the same. In his Volkswagen we drove southwest to Los Angeles down romantic Route 66. We camped by the edge of the Grand Canyon, where we learned for the first time the deeper implications of the word “immense.” We fought off a homosexual motelkeeper in San Bernardino and went deep-sea fishing off Santa Catalina Island with my great-uncle, a childless, adventurous man who loved his many nephews as if they were his own sons.

  We slept under the stars in a high-country campground in Yosemite National Park, where one morning I spoke crossly to Sam because he had failed to wake me when a black bear a few yards away batted a garbage can around as if it were a medicine ball. How could he have let me sleep through such an adventure? He was, he said, too frightened to move. We got drunk in Reno, roasted in Death Valley, and awoke shivering in snow-covered sleeping bags in a place in the Colorado Rockies called Neversummer Pass.

  When our money ran out we returned to Evanston, where we replenished our exchequer running informal swimming classes for neighborhood children at the beach; ours was really a babysitting service, but we did teach some youngsters to swim. Once again flush, we drove to New Orleans and sipped espresso and ate beignets at the Morning Call, where we imagined ourselves poets. And as August neared an end and our stake dwindled, Sam dropped me off in Evanston, then returned to his Connecticut home for a few days before the academic year began. We were high as kites. We had seen the world and henceforth nothing would chain us to the old farmstead.

  Then Rachel and her family came home from Europe. Much to the displeasure of her father, I was waiting at the door of their home as they arrived from O’Hare. Rachel took my hand as the others unloaded the taxi. “Let’s go for a walk, Hank,” she said, without inviting me inside. As we walked, she told me that she and her sisters had had long talks about me in Paris and Rome. They had wept, she said, as they compared my amiable charm with my prospects as a potential husband and breadwinner. “Hank, you are deaf,” said Rachel, who had always been blunt and honest in our relationship. “You’re a wonderful guy and I’ll always love you. But how are you going to make a living? What are you going to be able to do? You yourself don’t know. I need something more than that.”

  Naturally I tumbled into a maelstrom of affection, confusion, anger, and denial. I had loved Rachel for her frankness, and I still did, even if her words hurt mightily. Years later, putting myself in her place, I had to admit that what she said carried more than a germ of truth. Even at twenty-one I was too immature, too unformed to have any sort of prospects. Maybe I was bright and funny and a joy to be with, but I had no idea what I was going to do after graduation. And my by now habitual reticence with people I did not know was not an encouraging sign.

  Rachel, bless her heart, had attempted to end the relationship as kindly as she could, but also as cleanly and surgically as possible, so there would be no mistake in her meaning. Our old relationship was over, she said, but we could still “be friends.” Grudgingly and slowly I accepted the situation, and we did remain friends. From time to time during our senior year we met for a chat. One afternoon a few weeks before graduation, as we sat comfortably together in the foyer of her dormitory at Tufts, she confessed her wo
rries for her future. “If only I could get married!” she said. “What about me?” I thought—but with only the briefest twinge of regret.

  We remained in occasional friendly touch for a couple of years, until she married. She still lives in Glencoe, a homemaker and wife of a wealthy man, mother of four, active in civic and social affairs. I have not seen her for more than a quarter of a century, but my memories of her are fond ones, and I dearly hope that she is happy. My only regret for her is that she was born ten years too soon. If she had grown up in America during the feminist revolution of the early 1970s, she might have directed that awesome energy down avenues that could have made her famous.

  For two years I had given little thought to my deafness, to the idea that it could have consequences that would affect my life adversely. Now, thanks to being dumped by the woman I loved, it was back under my skin, gnawing away at my confidence. I became ever more conscious, ever more ashamed of my deaf speech. One night, at a formal fraternity meeting, it was my task as corresponding secretary to read the lengthy text of a letter from a college official to the forty or so assembled brothers. It was the first time since I had been pledged two years earlier that I had to speak before a group. There was no honorable way to avoid the awful duty.

  My mouth dried. My pulse hammered. My armpits dampened. My throat tensed. As I read, my voice turned thin and reedy. I panted as I continued, stopping to take a breath after almost every phrase. I must have been wholly unintelligible. I looked up. The brothers stared at me in amazement. I pressed on. They began to laugh—not so much in merriment, perhaps, but nervously, uncomprehendingly. I struggled through to the end, my face hot with shame, the seat of my trousers sticking sweatily to the chair.

  Quietly, as I gazed down at the table, the fraternity’s president continued the business of the meeting. A few moments later, when he paused, I raised my hand. “Point of personal privilege,” I said, the Robert’s Rules of Order euphemism for absenting oneself to answer a call of nature. I left the house and walked back to my dormitory.

  Abandoning a formal fraternity meeting in such a manner was a severe breach of ritual, an offense for which the president was empowered to levy a cash fine or even a suspension. “Point of personal privilege, Hank?” he said with heavy sarcasm later that night, after he had tracked me down in my room. “Come on!” But he added, more gently, “Look, I know what’s going through your mind. Come back to the house tomorrow and let’s forget it.”

  I couldn’t. Ten days later I wrote a formal letter to the president announcing that I was “going inactive,” relinquishing my membership. I had persuaded myself that I was doing so because the whole notion of college fraternities was based on a shallow and immature camaraderie, that it was undemocratic and perpetuated the worst form of social exclusion. The real reason was that I had lost my nerve. I had given in to my seething frustration over my speech.

  To make matters worse, that spring brought the corporate recruitment season for graduating seniors. I joined everyone else in the interviews, although I had no idea what I was qualified for. I did not know what questions to ask, how to comport myself. Always ill at ease, I sweated and stammered through dozens of interviews. I behaved like a nervous high schooler rather than a self-assured college senior about to graduate. And out of perhaps thirty interviews came one follow-up invitation to visit the home office. One out of thirty! My friends, meanwhile, were being wined and dined by nearly every company they talked to, some of them being offered positions in training programs on the spot.

  The sole company to ask me back was the Penn Mutual Life Insurance Company. I flew down to Philadelphia, talked inconclusively with a few executives, and scored abominably on the mathematics aptitude test. In the end the personnel director said, “You don’t really want to be an insurance man, do you?” He had thought they might make an actuary out of me. “No, I guess not,” I said, feeling thoroughly sorry for myself as I gazed out the window at ships lining the quays of the port of Philadelphia. “I’m going to go to sea.”

  A week or so later the dean called me into his office. “I understand you’re planning to go to sea, Henry,” he began. I stood puzzled for a moment, then remembered, and blushed. Those guys at Penn Mutual had ratted on me! “No, Dean,” I said, chuckling weakly, and explained it all. “I just said the first dumb thing that came to mind.”

  To the dean I was not the first Trinity senior to suffer a crise de confiance on the eve of graduation, when we at last fled—or were pushed from— the nest. “You may be worried, Henry,” he said, “but I have confidence in you. You’ll be all right. I think you’ll soon hear some good news that’ll surprise you. Now let me ask you: What else have you considered?”

  There wasn’t much. My English adviser had suggested library school, but I wasn’t interested in a dry and musty career in lonely book stacks. The University of Edinburgh had accepted me for graduate study, but I hadn’t the wherewithal to get to Scotland, let alone any idea what I might do with a graduate diploma in literature. And there was the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, which had offered me an assistantship—one that I had turned down. I wasn’t cut out for journalism, I thought.

  Thankfully someone else held the opposite view. For years an old family friend, David Botter, had watched me grow up. A onetime senior editor at Look magazine and a professor of journalism at Medill, he had often thought that I might make a good newsman, thanks in part to my having been the managing editor of the Evanston High School paper. He did not believe that deafness was necessarily a hindrance in certain aspects of the profession.

  Though journalism no longer held any interest for me, during Christmas vacation that senior year I spoke with him and, at my parents’ urging, filled out an application for the graduate program. But when the letter of acceptance arrived in the spring, together with a note saying that I’d been awarded an assistantship that would pay most of the tuition, I wasn’t interested. Almost all my friends at Trinity were going into banking or insurance, and I thought that was where I had to go, too. I wrote back to Medill declining with thanks.

  I strongly suspect that Botter and the Trinity dean conspired to persuade Medill to hold open both the place in the graduate class and the assistantship until my good sense got the better of me. Almost on the day before graduation, it did. With nothing else in sight on the employment horizon, I wrote back to Botter asking if my application could be reinstated. Not only was the place still open, he replied, but why not begin with a couple of summer courses at Medill and see how I fared?

  I was stunned at my good fortune. Somebody still believed in me.

  But that was not the good news the dean had alluded to when he had summoned me to his office. The day before commencement, I learned that I was graduating with honors in English, thanks to a senior thesis I had written on Faulkner’s Snopes trilogy the previous semester. (“Absolutely brilliant,” a drunken English professor had said at a party some months before. “Never saw anything like it. Brilliant.” Then, with a lurch and a hiccup: “For an undergraduate, of course.”)

  There would be no Phi Beta Kappa key; that 64 in calculus all those semesters ago had ensured that my four-year academic average would fall short of the required 88.

  But in at least one way I had lived up to the example my brother had set: I had graduated with honors.

  7

  And so at the end of June 1962 I found myself behind the counter of the men’s locker room at the Evanston Y, at the beck and call of any man or boy with a dime for a towel. It paid about 75 cents an hour, and it was the only part-time job I could find. Hardly an auspicious start for the career of a young man with a brand-new Bachelor of Arts degree.

  But my shame soon faded. Evanston is a college town, and its Y employed graduate students in all sorts of jobs, from janitors to gym instructors, and the locker-room clientele knew it. A few ignorant souls might assume I was a towel boy because I could do nothing else, but the handball players who stopped by my counte
r included professors, lawyers, and businessmen, and they noticed and commented on the books I was reading during slow periods. Several even gave me genuine insights into them.

  And, much to my surprise, I liked my summer studies at the Medill School of Journalism. In the 1950s and 1960s, along with Columbia University and the University of Missouri, Medill was a member of the highest triumvirate of the nation’s journalism schools. Unlike most other J-schools, which viewed themselves as scholarly institutions and emphasized research and theory, Medill was not at all academically pretentious. Its graduate program was in many ways as intellectually rigorous as any other academic department, but deep down Medill thought of itself as a trade school that produced journalistic craftsmen the way vocational schools turned out union-certified plumbers. Its aim was to teach students how to use pencil and typewriter the way carpenters wield hammer and saw: with care and precision and without a wasted movement. It succeeded so well that major metropolitan newspapers everywhere regarded its graduates as instantly employable, often hiring them right out of school instead of waiting for them to acquire a few years’ seasoning on small-town dailies.

  Some of Medill’s professors were tenured, distinguished holders of doctorates who had earned their spurs in the field, but more were working journalists who labored full-time for Chicago newspapers and magazines. They taught part-time at Medill for two reasons: to earn a few freelance dollars and because deep down in every good journalist a schoolmaster struggles to emerge. Many develop highly individualistic ways of working that they think worth passing on to a new generation.