Train Go Sorry

by Leah Hager Cohen

  Schools and other institutions found that they could capitalize on the popularity, which heightened consciousness even further. Sign language classes proliferated, spawning jobs for deaf teachers and consultants to create standards and curricula. High schools and colleges began offering sign language courses and allowing students to use ASL to meet foreign language requirements. Public and private agencies began listing TDD numbers for hearing- and speech-impaired callers.

  Meanwhile, advances in technology were changing what it meant to be deaf. Toll-free relay services began spreading through states across the nation. New signaling and communication devices, ever more compact and complex, appeared on the market. Listening devices became available in public spaces such as theaters and museums. Real-time captioning made it possible to project a speaker’s words onto a large screen instantaneously at live lectures. More television shows and commercials were closed-captioned, and legislation was passed requiring that after June 1993, all televisions with screens larger than thirteen inches must come with built-in decoders. Deaf people could partake in society as never before.

  Developments occurred in another arena as well, but here the accolades fade. This is the arena of medical technology, where developments have sparked a controversy that rivals, in the heat of its passion and the seriousness of its stakes, the great old oral-manual debate. The deaf community and hearing professionals are again at odds. In the old debate over language, deaf people fought for autonomy and dignity. Now they are fighting for the future of their culture.

  The chief point of contention in this battle is the cochlear implant. To hearing professionals who have been trained to view deafness as a pathology, as a defect, the implant may look like a panacea. To hearing parents who have just learned that their child cannot hear, cannot communicate or understand them, the implant may look like salvation. But to members of the deaf community, who, without regrets or apologies, regard deafness as a culture, the implant is an indictment and a threat.

  Imagine coming up with a “cure” for any other cultural minority or oppressed group—African Americans, say, or women, or Jewish people. Most hearing people find this analogy strained. After all, deafness is a handicap. No one could disagree that a person’s life would be made easier if she could be cured of deafness. But couldn’t we say the same thing about black people and women and Jews? In our society, isn’t it more convenient to be white and male and Christian? Isn’t life generally easier for members of the dominant culture? Yet we wouldn’t dream of searching for ways to “cure” blackness or femaleness or Jewishness. Even if it were medically possible, it would be ethically abhorrent, a kind of cultural genocide. This is how many culturally deaf people view the efforts of the medical establishment to prevent, correct, and minimize the effects of hearing impairment.

  While the National Association of the Deaf does oppose the use of cochlear implants in children on medical grounds, citing the potential dangers involved in the surgery, the crux of its argument relates to issues of culture and selfdetermination. Hearing professionals contend that the younger the candidate is, the more effective the implants can be. But deaf leaders point out that when children are implanted, it is hearing people—parents and doctors—who make the decision. They believe that children ought to be allowed to grow up with exposure to other deaf children and adults, to acquire and use ASL, to develop positive attitudes toward their own deafness and all of deaf culture, and then to choose for themselves whether to receive the implant or not. Deaf leaders maintain that few people who grow up with this kind of exposure would be likely to opt for the implant.

  But the deaf community faces an extraordinary task in trying to persuade hearing parents and medical authorities, to whom the hope of “curing” deafness will always outweigh the benefits of promoting deaf culture. Deaf people have been labeled for centuries as mentally deficient, socially naive, and incapable of sound moral judgment. Overcoming these stigmas may take more time than the community has left.

  Already a newly refined cochlear implant, touted as far more effective than those currently in use, is hitting the market. Scientists are now expecting a new infant vaccine to virtually wipe out meningitis, currently the leading cause of deafness in children. As health care improves in general, less deafness is being caused by illness and improper treatment. At the same time, those who are already deaf are finding themselves presented with more options, from implants to telecommunications to mainstreaming to protective legislation, for gaining more access to the hearing world.

  The deaf population is shrinking. That which remains is further depleted by options that encourage migration into hearing culture. As technology evolves, the pool will almost certainly continue to shrink. How bittersweet that the technology that has so enabled deaf people may ultimately, inevitably, precipitate the community’s demise.

  Among many deaf people, the proposition of cultural demise is still almost unmentionable; in certain circles, speaking of it is a sort of sacrilege. There are those, however, who are beginning to speculate and predict. And if it should happen, really, what will have been lost? If deaf culture should recede into the past, eventually assuming only static existence in a few sign language dictionaries and ASL videotapes on the shelf of a narrowly fabricated history, would any of us be the poorer? If everyone could hear, if we could all speak and listen, explain and understand in a single language, would we be somehow closer, better? Would there be more hope for us as humans?

  Unfortunately, being physically equipped to hear has little to do with the predilection to listen. Sharing a common tongue does not ensure earnest or successful communication. Missed connections occur among hearing people all the time, splitting open countless minor chasms and yawning gulches, fissures that no vaccine or technological advance will ever be able to mend or prevent. That task will always fall to us.

  It is a common language, the acquisition of language, that informs a cultural sensibility. Hearing people often remark in reverent, near-mystical tones about how beautiful sign language is, and to some extent this may be attributed to the inherent movements of the language itself. But the power of its beauty derives from what it symbolizes.

  Its very existence is a testament to people’s will to communicate. It pays tribute to our determination to make connections in the face of incredible odds. And although deaf culture as it exists today might come to an end, the potency of this symbol will never fade—nor will our need for it ever lessen.

  My father may be on his way out. Deaf culture may be entering its decline. At the ragged ends of certain days, they seem headed down parallel gangplanks. On other days, that notion seems wildly implausible, like the sour stuff of nightmares reexamined in the light of the sun.

  One day toward the end of spring, I went into the superintendent’s office, heard my father on the phone in the next room, and remained in the outer chamber, opposite the desk of his indomitable assistant, Barbara Robinson. Barbara had the window open; a warm breeze ruffled her plants, and the sounds of recess cracked carelessly against the brick walls of the courtyard below. We grinned hello at each other and tussled briefly over whether or not I would accept a couple of homemade sugar cookies to which Barbara had fallen prey (yet another bake sale) and which she was now trying to foist on me. Eventually I reclined in one of the visitor’s chairs, cookie in hand, trying not to get crumbs on my skirt. I had dressed up a little bit that day, having wrangled an invitation to join my father and Dr. Leo Connor for lunch.

  Dr. Connor became Lexington’s superintendent the year I was bom and held that position until he retired twelve years later, when my father took the job. While our family lived at Lexington, Dr. Connor and his wife lived in the apartment above us; we were neighbors. I remembered Dr. Connor as extremely serious, with a precise, contained voice like the engine of a machine. His appearance was always neat and orderly; there was something almost courtly about him, which as a little girl I had found forbidding, and which had made my father’s succeeding him seem
incongruous—my father, the endless purveyor of jokes and stories, the signer, the ballplayer, the questioner, him with his Bronx teeth and solemn eyes and shirtsleeves.

  About once a year, the two men meet for a meal. Dr. Connor remains executive director emeritus, an honorary position that does not entail maintaining contact with the daily workings of the school, but he likes to receive occasional briefings. And there is something my father likes about these meetings too, something valuable he derives from them. Something like history. A sense of place, of the changes wrought by the passage of time, and his relationship to it all. It has been a quarter of a century since the beginning of both my father’s career and the deaf civil rights movement. Changes have occurred, and continue to occur, at a fantastic rate. I think lunches with Dr. Connor offer my father a kind of touchstone, an opportunity for reflection that becomes increasingly valuable and difficult to come by as deaf politics and Lexington politics grow more turbulent.

  I was looking forward to the lunch with a nostalgic curiosity myself, and wished my father would finish up his telephone call. I became aware that his voice was projecting rather noticeably from behind the wall.

  “Come down here and we’ll show you!” he bellowed. And then again, up a notch: “Come down here and we’ll show you!”

  I cocked an eye at Barbara and asked with surprise whether he was angry or just talking with a hard-of-hearing person. She gave me a shrewd look and answered quietly, “No, he’s angry.” He was on the phone with the school bus company responsible for picking up some of the emotionally disturbed students from Lexington’s Special Education Unit; one of the drivers had been complaining about the students’ erratic behavior.

  “Don’t use words like ‘crazy’ and ‘hysterical,’” my father roared. “Don’t talk about them that way!”

  Barbara and I exchanged tight, queer smiles: it was so strange to hear him yell, so rare to see him lose his temper.

  He emerged a few minutes later his usual self and sparred unsuccessfully with Barbara over whether he would accept the remaining cookie. Then he and I headed out to the parking lot, my father stooping to pick up litter in front of the main entrance, as was his custom. I thought he seemed tired. We drove slowly from the neighborhood, the sun kicking up spots all over the windshields of parked cars, tulips clustering upright around blue plaster lawn Madonnas, and crossed Astoria Boulevard. I was feeling that imperative to watch things closely, to notice stop signs and traffic lights, to look over my shoulder for oncoming cars when we made a turn, trying to share silently in the burden of getting us there.

  Dr. Connor met us at the La Guardia Marriott. We sat behind a pillar, away from the glare of the picture windows, and Dr. Connor and my father mulled over changes in the field. During lunch, my father seemed to borrow some of his former boss’s detachment; he seemed to lighten and relax, and he described Lexington’s troubles with gentle irony. Dr. Connor congratulated him on becoming president-elect of the Conference of Educational Administrators Serving the Deaf, an old and influential national organization. (At the election, my father had been honored to learn that he was the candidate supported by the ad hoc caucus of deaf administrators; at the same time he had wondered, only half in jest, whether he could fulfill his presidential duties if he was ousted from Lexington.)

  As I listened to the men talk, I thought how different from each other they were, in terms of background and style and educational philosophy, yet how amiable and mutually respectful. They shared the conviction that one of the things that makes Lexington a good place is its willingness to stand apart from popular trends. But Dr. Connor was always more of a traditionalist, whereas my father, after spending his entire adult life at the school, is perceived as a maverick by enough people to jeopardize his job. I knew that back when Dr. Connor was superintendent, the two did not always see eye to eye. Yet Dr. Connor chose my father as a protégé and subtly groomed him for the responsibility of directing the school.

  My father may have been musing over this as well, because near the end of the meal, with sudden and frank curiosity, he asked the older man, “What did you see in me?”

  With very little pause, Dr. Connor answered, “Intelligence and stubbornness.”

  Then I know my father must have been thinking the same thing I was, because he exclaimed, sounding dubious and pleased, “I was stubborn?”

  “Yes,” asserted Dr. Connor, this time with no pause at all. “You had steel in the backbone. Strong beliefs.”

  My father tucked his chin into his neck and frowned at his hands, folded on the edge of the tablecloth: he was extremely flattered.

  Back outside, after lunch and goodbyes, the breeze had dropped. As my father and I drove back to Lex, the late afternoon unfurled, rich and mellow. A sunbather had dragged a lawn chair onto the field near the school; an ice cream truck blared hurdy-gurdy music out in front; people sat on the steps of the main entrance eating bananas and ice pops and signing. It had turned into one of those days when it was not possible to conceive of my father’s leaving Lexington, nor of deaf culture’s ever disappearing.

  We left my father’s office that day at the usual time, a little before six. He likes to claim that the usual is five; when pushed he will confess to five-fifteen, but in this he is sorely mistaken. All my life I have seen how difficult it can be to get him to leave.

  When we emerged from the building, after a series of good evenings and good evenings to custodians and kids we met on the way out, the whole block was gilded by the clear slanting light of the June evening. My father stashed a five-inch stack of manila folders in the trunk of his car, then turned as he heard a car cruising slowly up to where we stood. Two alumni, both in their late twenties, both former wrestlers, idled a big gray van opposite him. He put his hands on his hips, and they all gazed at one another fondly for a minute.

  “Did you work at the post office today?” my father asked the one who was driving.

  I set down my bag and leaned against the car to wait out the small talk. There was no telling how long this might last.

  “Tonight. I have an eight-hour shift, starting at eight.”

  My father grimaced. “Do you sleep on the job? ”

  “Most of the time,” he was affably assured.

  “That’s my tax money!” my father protested. “I bought you this van!”

  Everyone laughed. My father reached inside the window to yank down the brim of the driver’s cap.

  “You guys are funny,” he pronounced, and they beamed.

  When no one had anything left to say, they all stayed right where they were for just a little longer.

  18

  Graduation

  At the last senior class meeting before graduation, everyone is edgy, and it’s not just the heat, although undoubtedly that contributes a layer of tension, even here in the basement where it ought to be cool. The students are looking very sharp and self-conscious, with their hair scraped back or gelled or cut into fresh summer styles. The scent of cocoa butter intensifies with sweat, and bits of skin flash through their loosely crocheted vests, muscle shirts, and halters. They tip forward on metal folding chairs, angling themselves so they can see their class leaders, who have just jerked the light switch, calling the meeting to order.

  James watches from the back of the room, focusing on the speakers intently. Amid the giddy anxiety of his classmates, he seems a well of stillness, soberly awaiting instructions about his last days at Lex. In the tilt of his chin, which he lifts now so he can see over heads, there resides a certain delicacy that makes him seem at once childlike and suddenly adult.

  During the past month, however, James has not been without his own share of edginess, which has translated in turns into irritability (as supervisor of the bus room, he autocratically imposed a three-day ban on using the room as an afterschool hangout, in response to the unruly behavior of certain fellow students) and a kind of dopey sang-froid, which he uses to deflect serious thoughts about his future. In fact, the closer the
future gets, the less he is able to envision himself in it, and he finds himself flirting with ways to stave it off.

  Mostly, James has been thinking that Camden County College, whose summer program he is slated to begin next month, is really too far from home—after all, it’s so far down the New Jersey Turnpike it’s practically in Pennsylvania. James visited the campus on a school field trip this April, on a colorless day of tearing winds and insistent drizzle, and he maintained a critical eye throughout. The classroom divider walls were flimsy, cheap; the cafeteria portions were small; the buildings were too spread out. Worst of all, the campus apartments came unfurnished; students had to supply their own furniture.

  “How?” James asked their campus guide, one of the deaf college students. He was still chewing on the wooden stick of an ice cream bar he had bought at lunch; a muscle flashed rhythmically at his temple.

  “Borrow a car or rent a U-Haul,” the guide explained with cheery helpfulness.

  James considered the likelihood of being able to do either. “We have to bring our own bed, even?”

  “That’s right.”

  He stared at her for a moment, gnawing the ice cream stick in deliberate circles. Then he broke into a saucy mime, marching in place with a giant phantom bed hefted on one shoulder. This drew laughter from the Lex students standing around him, and James grinned, all dimples and chipped tooth, asserting his easy charm while diffusing any rebuke the student guide might have sensed. But inside, he felt shaken. The world now expected him to provide his own bed. It seemed unfairly, almost cruelly, abrupt.

  Back at Lexington, he began mentioning to various friends that he might not choose to go to college right away. He toyed with the notion of staying in the Bronx instead and finding a job. Most of his older deaf friends were doing just that; some didn’t even bother with the job, but managed to scrape by on their SSI checks alone.