by Henry Kisor
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.
The news was so stunning that the editor in charge of the Blue Streak was momentarily dumbfounded, wondering out loud whether he should discard his plans for Page One, at that moment being assembled in the composing room one floor below. Bill had both the presence of mind and the temerity to spin around in his chair and bellow at his superior, “You’re gonna rip that page apart. This is a big one!”
It was a baptism of fire, assembling “take” after “take” from the city desk, making sure that there were no contradictions, that all the important facts stood high in the story, and writing the headlines with only minutes to spare. The pressure was on, but we made our 7:10 a.m. press deadline with good, solid stories. Richard Speck may have been a heinous killer, but I owe him a debt of sorts: he helped me prove my competence. That may sound obscene, but it was a fact of the profession of journalism, at least before the explosion in specialization that began about 1980, that career advancement depended on timely and lively handling of crime and catastrophe. Only after paying our dues in the trenches of police news were we able to struggle out of them.
As time went on, I soon began working other jobs on the shift. When the night national and foreign editor was off duty, I’d fill in. This was fascinating, exacting work. Copy constantly flowed in from the clattering teletype machines in the wire room, bearing London, Paris, and Moscow datelines. Often I’d compile a single story with information from three different sources—the Associated Press, United Press International, and the Daily News’s own correspondents. Once in a long while there’d be a discrepancy I couldn’t solve on my own, and I’d ask someone on the copy desk to call the bureau or news service to check. My deafness never seemed a hindrance in this sort of work.
There was a telephone at the copy desk, and it was fairly busy during the last hour before Page One, the last to be sent to press, was “locked up” on the composing-room floor. These were the last years of “hot type,” when pages were assembled in large steel forms from long “sticks” of soft metal type set and cast on Linotype machines. For the most part makeup editors could trim and adjust stories to fit their allotted holes, but as the deadline crept near, especially if there was breaking news, they’d phone the copy desk for aid. If I was in the slot, an editor on the rim would take the call and pass on the requests from below.
I never, however, worked the slot on really busy nights when Bill Rising was on duty—when there was a storm at sea, he commanded from the bridge—so I was never tripped up by the telephone under pressure. Had I remained on the night shift, I probably could have grown into a decent copy chief. But there was another problem, and it had nothing to do with my deafness. Despite working for two and a half years on the Blue Streak shift, I never was able to adjust my circadian rhythm so that I could consistently get eight hours of sleep each day. I was simply not a born night worker. During the day I’d toss and turn fitfully, getting less and less sleep as the week wore on, and make up for the deprivation by sleeping at night during weekends. Toward the end I became dependent on Placidyl, a sleeping drug that when abused causes the user to stumble around in a zombie-like fog, never quite fully alert.
I asked Dan Sullivan if he could assign me to the day shift. By then I had earned enough seniority to claim a daytime spot on the copy desk, and I slid into it gratefully. After ten days of cold-turkey withdrawal, I beat the Placidyl dependency and settled down to a more normal existence.
By this time, our son Colin was on the way. He was born September 18, 1969, at Evanston Hospital. In those days expectant fathers still waited offstage instead of playing a supporting role at the delivery, and I smoked cigarette after cigarette in the waiting room while Debby went through the last stages of labor.
Then the door opened and the obstetrician strode in. I recall that he looked tired and drawn, but assumed that that was normal for doctors called out of bed in the small hours. He smiled and shook my hand. “Congratulations,” he said. “You have a son.” I was so flooded with relief that I began trembling. “Thank you, Doctor,” I said with a quaver in my voice. “Is everything all right?” Momentarily, he glanced away, then looked back at me. “Yes,” he said. “Both Debby and the baby are well. You can go see them now.”
Overwhelmed, I rushed into the recovery room. Debby was groggy, almost incoherent, unsmiling. The baby was not with her. “Let me sleep,” she said irritatedly. A nurse brought Colin over and I held him briefly, tears in my eyes. Then I dashed to my parents’ house to spread the good news.
The next day, recovered, Debby told me what had happened, what the obstetrician had concealed. Right after the moment of birth, she had suffered a grand mal seizure. The doctor had decided not to tell me. He didn’t know whether I was capable, at that moment, of dealing with the news, what consequence my deafness might have, whether he could get across to me what the seizure meant. There are a number of causes of seizures during delivery, and one of the most common is a brain tumor. He felt he didn’t need a second crisis on his hands.
It turned out that Debby did not have a tumor. We never learned what caused the seizure, although a neurologist later speculated that the cause might have been a chemical imbalance during pregnancy. In any case, I was resentful. Here, I thought, was a doctor paternalistically withholding information from someone who had a right to it. Debby, however, took the obstetrician’s side. She, not I, was his patient, and in the absence of knowledge about me, he had to call the shot as he saw it.
He would have to do it again four years later, when our second son, Conan, was born. By then fathers in the delivery room were commonplace. Debby asked me if I wanted to be present. She had discussed the matter with the obstetrician, and he agreed that I had a right to be consulted. I thought about it. Though there was every reason to expect the delivery to be normal, another seizure was possible. If something went wrong, how would I know what was happening? Everyone wore a mask. In an emergency there might not be time for a nurse to pull down her mask and tell me what was going on. It was possible that I could unwittingly get in the way and jeopardize the lives of mother and child.
We decided to leave the decision to the doctor. He was the professional and could see the problem from more angles than I. Forthrightly he said he’d rather not have me present. He wanted to minimize the risks. That was all right with me. And in the end, the delivery went smoothly for mother and child—and daddy.
There was, however, one more reproductive medical experience to bear— the single most difficult sequence of events I have experienced in my life. Like most young men, I had considered myself inextinguishable, even charmed. Vaguely, I had thought that having contracted meningitis at age three—the odds against
doing so were one in a hundred thousand— would somehow insure me for the rest of my life against further medical catastrophe. In 1980, however, the thunderbolt of chance struck for the second time.
The year before, when Colin was ten and Conan six, Debby and I had decided to limit our family to the two robust sons it had been our good fortune to produce. After thoroughly researching the question, we decided that the best solution was a vasectomy. The procedure was and is simple, is done with a local anesthetic, involves little discomfort, and the risks are tiny—there is only about one failure per thousand vasectomies. So in due course I presented myself one morning for outpatient surgery to a veteran urologist at nearby Evanston Hospital.
Unlike most doctors I had encountered, the urologist was sensitive to my deafness. It was his habit to give vasectomy patients a cut-by-cut, stitch-by-stitch account of the surgery, much like a baseball broadcaster. To ensure that I knew what was going on, he pulled down his gauze mask so that I could read his lips as he gave the play-by-play. That was very decent of him, I thought, but after a few minutes of lying flat on my back while the doctor waved a sharp blade in the most sensitive of my neighborhoods, I decided I would rather not know the details. Until the game was over I looked straight up at the ceiling.
But during the spring of 1980, Debby discovered that she was pregnant, and we were thunderstruck. This was an eventuality we had not anticipated, and in the early days we were shattered. The doctors and nurses at our health maintenance organization seemed cold and disapproving, as if they believed the pregnancy must have been the result of an extramarital affair, and that a quick abortion would be Debby’s wish.