I Can Hear You Whisper (12 page)

Graser and his wife, Barbara, took to playing games to practice his listening skills. House's daughter, Karen, a filmmaker, captured one for posterity.

“Say some of the simple words to get me started,” says Graser, a square-jawed, black-haired man, who was forty-four at the time. For the game, he removes the electronics case, with its microphone and processor, from his pocket and holds it up close to his wife's mouth. Then he looks away so he can't see her lips.

Barbara leans in close with her arm resting on his shoulder and says, “Baby.”

“Say it again.”

“Baby.”

“Baby,” he repeats. Then he turns to look at her. “Am I right?”

She nods and he turns away again. Concentrating hard, Graser gets “sailboat” and “earthquake” but stumbles on “cowboy.” Then they try some sentences. He misses “It's time for supper.” But the next one is easy: “Baby, it's cold outside,” he repeats after her with a big grin. “I remember that one.”

Listening to the world now, especially to music, is a bit like the game he plays with Barbara, he says: “You put enough clues together, and you hope you're pretty close to knowing what's going on.”

On the same film, a nineteen-year-old woman named Karen, the first congenitally deaf person House implanted, is shown hearing sound for the first time. She is sitting in the laboratory with machines all around her. Unlike Graser's, her electrodes had been completely implanted. The behind-the-ear plug was gone, and signals were to be sent via radio transmission through the skin from a coil held to the outside of her head. Until the external and internal coils lined up, there would be no sound. (In later versions, a magnet solved this problem.) In the clip, House stands behind Karen, holding back her long dark hair and circling the external coil slowly behind her ear. “Can you hear my voice?” Jack Urban says periodically. Karen's sister, Andy, stands nearby, echoing Urban: “Can you hear my voice?”

Suddenly, Karen's eyes widen and her face brightens. She raises her closed fist and shakes it forward and back, signing:
YES
!
YES
! Her sister signs that she should begin counting . . .

“One . . . two . . . three . . .” Karen's voice has the flat, nasal tone common to the deaf. She shakes her fist again, then hesitates as the sound disappears.

“One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . .” Her eyes widen again, and she begins to cry. She holds her hand to her chest for a second, then covers her face momentarily. It is the first time she has ever heard her own voice.

A few minutes later, Karen is showing off. The external transmitter has been fixed in place with a headband. Urban is playing “Six Variations on the Turkish March” by Beethoven, and she is grandly rolling her hand away from her mouth to indicate someone singing, to show that she recognizes music.

“It was a moment I will never forget,” House tells me as we sit watching the film together.

“Did you get emotional yourself sometimes?” I ask.

“Yes,” he says quietly.

Parts of the movie of Karen were shown on
60 Minutes
,
Nova
,
That's Incredible!
, and a 1975 National Geographic special called “The Incredible Machine.” The dreams of science fiction seemed to have been made real.

 • • • 

As Chuck Graser proved, some people did very well with the House implant. But the device had serious limitations. Based on Graser's responses, House and Urban had decided to use only one electrode—a single channel of information—that would stimulate the entire cochlea at once rather than separate electrodes capable of stimulating discrete sections of nerve fibers. While there was a lot researchers didn't know about hearing, House's device violated one principle they did know: the tonotopic theory, the idea established by Békésy that frequencies were laid out along the basilar membrane like keys on a piano. The Frenchmen—Djourno and Eyriès—had already concluded that multiple channels would be necessary to understand speech. Dr. Nelson Kiang, one of the most prominent auditory neurophysiologists in the nation, maintained that, Graser's experience notwithstanding, a single-channel implant could only produce a kind of buzzing. “
Enthusiastic testimonials from patients cannot take the place of objective measures of performance capabilities,” said Kiang. Scientifically speaking, he was right. “There were some basic fallacies in House's understanding of auditory physiology,” Marc Eisen told me. Yet it was undeniable that something was working for patients like Graser.

“I remember once having an argument with [House] about the sort of simpleminded engineering approach he had adopted,” Michael Merzenich told me. “And he said, ‘Mike, if I have a man that has no leg and I can give him a stick to prop his leg up on, I'm going to give it to him.' The first thing I thought was, That's ridiculous. Then when I thought about it a little bit, I thought, Well, you know, so would I.” Merzenich laughed heartily at the memory. “You have to give him a lot of credit for being courageous. He was a man filled to the brim with gumption.”

In 1975, all thirteen existing cochlear implant patients—each with a single-channel device—traveled to Pittsburgh for a week of evaluation. The National Institutes of Health had waded into the debate and funded an independent review headed by Dr. Robert Bilger, an audiologist and neurophysiologist at the University of Pittsburgh. Eleven of the patients, including Graser, were House's and two had been implanted by a San Francisco doctor named Robin Michelson, who had gotten into the game a little later than House and Simmons and created a device of his own. (It was Michelson who brought Merzenich into the work.) Bilger began the study as a skeptic but emerged modestly optimistic. His report was released in 1977, and the findings were announced by the chairman of Pittsburgh's ear, nose, and throat department, Eugene Myers. There was no longer any question that cochlear implants worked, said Myers. They did. Users found them helpful with lipreading and had improved awareness of environmental sounds. Myers likened their stage of development to the
Wright brothers' flight at Kitty Hawk. Bill House had indeed reinvented the airplane.

It should have been vindication, yet the moment was bittersweet. Yes, cochlear implants worked, said the report, but House's single-channel device was not the way forward for understanding speech. Overall, the average closed-set word recognition score in the Bilger study was 16 percent (closed-set word lists are related and somewhat predictable)—better than without an implant but a long way from conversational understanding. The study concluded: “[A single-channel device] will not provide a speech input that either sounds speech-like, or is understandable. . . . Until such multichannel prostheses become a reality, one must consider the question of whether or not it is reasonable to continue implanting single-channel prostheses.”

House was frustrated and angry. Perhaps this is the saddest part of his story, the part that explains how House could be viewed as both a hero and a kook. For decades after the
Bilger report, House defended his single-channel device, insisting that it did allow some people to hear speech. That was true, but only for a very few. “The single channel provides an electrical field without any pitch discrimination,” explains Dr. Simon Parisier, one of the first otolaryngologists to embrace cochlear implants. “Most people get good information [combining it] with lipreading; a few star people could understand without lipreading.” But for the majority, a single-channel implant provided only access to environmental sounds—the footsteps and car horns House mentioned in 1967. “In medicine,” says Parisier, “the person who develops something never gives it up. House never really accepted the multichannel device.” That meant House and his considerable achievements were left behind when cochlear implants advanced to the next stage. “He was stubborn,” says his nephew, John House. “It's unfortunate.”

Fifty years later, sitting in his living room, Bill House tries to be philosophical. “It's the pioneer that gets the arrows,” he says. His tone suggests that some of those arrows hurt.

I
n 1967, the same year that Blair Simmons stood in front of a crowd of doctors and scientists to discuss the possibility of creating an artificial ear that worked, another man took to a different stage one thousand miles to the east for a presentation that would help to transform the world of the deaf in a completely different way.

“The lone actor strutted proudly to the center of the stage, chest out, and head held high,” wrote Jack Gannon in his history of the deaf in America. “
He bowed slightly, then straightened and moved his head slowly sideways as his eyes scanned the audience. He raised his right, white-gloved hand and fingerspelled with machine-gun rapidity: ‘G-i-a-n-n-i-S-c-h-i-c-c-h-i.' He clapped his hands and suddenly the stage was overflowing with colorfully-costumed actors and movement . . . movement everywhere. Hands, fingers, faces, bodies, and voices began to communicate. No one had ever seen anything like it before.”

This unusual version of Puccini's comic one-act opera was one of four short plays that made up the first performance of the
National Theatre of the Deaf, and though only
six people bought tickets, the curtain had been raised on a new era.

The idea for a theater company showcasing deaf actors was first proposed in the 1950s by Edna Levine, a psychologist who worked with the deaf, and Anne Bancroft and Arthur Penn, the star and director respectively of the Broadway production of
The Miracle Worker
. They couldn't get funding and the project died. In the 1960s, the idea was revived by Broadway set designer David Hays, who had been captivated by a signed performance he saw at Gallaudet. Hays joined forces with Bernard Bragg, a deaf actor whose popular one-man mime performances earned him a four-year run on television in a show called
The Quiet Man
. They found a fitting home for the experimental troupe in the newly established Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut.

After oralism took over in deaf schools at the end of the nineteenth century, sign language was relegated to “a villain-like role,” wrote Gannon. Teachers and parents blamed sign language when deaf students struggled with English. “As a result, sign language became unpopular and a stigma was attached to it which made many [people] uncomfortable and unwilling to use it in public.”

Ted Supalla, a linguist who studies ASL at Georgetown University Medical Center, and who also happens to be married to neuroscientist Elissa Newport, grew up in such an environment. In the Deaf world, Supalla is “deaf of deaf,” meaning his parents were deaf and he was raised signing. Even if he wasn't an expert on ASL, that makes him royalty of a sort, at the top of the Deaf social hierarchy. It was his younger brother, Sam, who had to be told the little girl next door was
HEARING
.

Although the Supallas used sign language at home and at the Deaf clubs where they socialized, Ted, who is profoundly deaf and got no help from hearing aids, began school in the 1950s and had to communicate with the teachers at the Oregon School for the Deaf in English. When we met at Georgetown, I could see that his ASL was beautiful, though I had to rely on an interpreter because mine was rudimentary. He described a day at school when he was clearly frustrated and a teacher took him out to the hall to talk to him alone. To his amazement, she began to use sign language. His relief was so enormous, he remembers, “I started to cry.” But then he had to go back into the classroom and use his voice, which was not something he did well. “I just read books in class all day long,” he says. “I knew I was missing out.” His solution was eventually to transfer to a hearing school, which he attended without the benefit of an interpreter as there were none to be had in those days. If he was going to be hamstrung by lack of communication either way, he figured he was better off in the hearing school.

Then one day, as a young man, he attended a performance of the fledgling National Theatre of the Deaf, who “put sign language onstage literally,” he says. For Supalla, that moment led to a career, first in the theater and then studying sign language as an academic. All around him, other deaf people were having a similar experience and found themselves thinking about deafness and sign language in new ways.

That had been the goal. When Hays and Bragg and their colleagues started work, they took an entirely new approach. Although pantomime was popular in deaf theater groups in Europe, and it was what Bragg was known for, the group chose to limit its use in their productions. “They decided to make NTD a theatre of language—a theatre that would concentrate on visual language,” wrote Gannon. For
Gianni Schicchi
and all subsequent performances, they brought theater to a deaf audience who could, of course, follow the signing (it was initially
a theatrical version of signed English). But they always included hearing actors who signed and spoke their own roles and interpreted for the deaf actors, thereby making signing accessible to the hearing. Not every critic loved every performance, but some plays were immensely successful.
Boston Herald
drama editor Samuel Hirsch described the result as “pure art, drawn from a new medium of human expression.” The critic for
The
National Observer
called the shows “exciting, inventive, beautiful, and unusual.”

In 1971, NTD moved beyond translating existing works when cast members produced their first original play,
My Third Eye
. It included a biographical segment in which the actors described some of their experiences as deaf children. Bragg told of being taken away to a residential school at the age of four and a half. As he and his mother, who was also deaf, traveled to the New York School for the Deaf, she didn't reply to his urgent questions about where they were going. Once there, they stood in the superintendent's office.

“I was filled with the sickening panic of a washed-away world. My mother kissed me and said, ‘This is the place where you will get all your education . . . ,' she kissed me and was gone.”

Mary Beth Miller said: “I would teach some of the kids who knew no sign language. The teacher would tie my hands together.”

Ed Waterstreet: “Same in my school, when I tried to sign with my friends the teacher caught me and made me sit on my hands.”

That they could now be using that same language onstage was an extraordinary turn of events. As Bragg put it: “People used to push my hands down in embarrassment and tell me not to sign in public. Now people pay to see me perform in sign language.”

 • • • 

The change in perspective did not just spring from the minds of these actors. Others had begun to think that sign language deserved more respect. Chief among them was a Gallaudet English professor named
William Stokoe. He was hearing, as were many Gallaudet professors in that era, and was unfamiliar with sign language until he got to campus. Fascinated, he enlisted the help of two deaf assistants, Carl Croneberg and Dorothy Casterline, and began filming people as they signed. As he pored over the resulting films, Stokoe began to see patterns.

Until then, the assumption was that sign language wasn't a language at all. Beyond being a means of communication, languages had to have, in linguistic terms, rules governing the way their symbols could be used, combined, and transformed. No one had ever looked at sign language this way or seriously considered that it might qualify. In thousands of hours spent studying people as they signed, Stokoe found rules: units of meaning, patterns of word order, and points of contrast. “
He was the first linguist to subject sign language to the tests of a real language, and he found that it withstood them all,” wrote Gannon.

At first, no one was impressed. Even deaf people were skeptical or dismissive. According to Carol Padden and Tom Humphries, the thinking was that communicating in signs was “just something we did.” Many had absorbed the negative view of what they called “the sign language.” In 1965, however, Stokoe, Croneberg, and Casterline got more attention when they published
A Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles
. The book marked the first time the sign language was given the formal name American Sign Language. (Sign languages are no more universal than spoken languages, and each country has its own. Even English-speaking countries such as Britain and the United States use very different sign languages.)

Instead of describing signs according to pictures, the authors recognized that the signs were composed of smaller parts—such as handshape, location, and movement—akin to the phonemes and morphemes (units of sound and meaning) in spoken language. In the
Dictionary
, signs were organized according to those smaller parts rather than categories or English translations. Signs in which all five fingers of the hand were spread in the
5
sign, for example, were listed together according to their location: on the chin (
MOTHER
), on the forehead (
FATHER
), and on the chest (
FINE
). Add movement and you get
GRANDMOTHER
(by bouncing the hand away from the chin) and
GRANDFATHER
(bouncing it away from the forehead). Stokoe even invented a complicated new system of notation to describe each sign. Though the response to Stokoe's work was mixed at the beginning, he had planted the seeds for what quickly grew into a science of signed languages.

 • • • 

Meanwhile, the civil rights and feminist movements were unfolding through the 1960s and 1970s, and new ideas of identity and political consciousness began to take hold. By the 1984 publication of Harlan Lane's history of the deaf,
When the Mind Hears
, that thinking had matured. The book, from which I learned so much about early deaf education, was a call to arms. Lane called it “
a study in the anatomy of prejudice” and claimed that a fear of diversity had led the hearing majority to oppress the deaf minority over the centuries through a series of “sustained outrages against fundamental human values” such as “the attempt to force assimilation, to claim biological insufficiency when assimilation fails, to indoctrinate minority children in majority values through the schools.” The deaf, declared Lane, do not belong to a class of disability but to a linguistic minority.

Most of the deaf were far less politicized than Lane, but he was right that, like many minorities, they had long found comfort in each other. They knew they had a “way of doing things” and that there was what they called a “deaf world.” Largely invisible to hearing people, it was a place where many average deaf people lived contented, fulfilling lives. Lou Ann Walker depicts it beautifully in her memoir of growing up with deaf parents,
A Loss for Words
. In her father's work as a newspaper printer, with their deaf friends, and at home with their three hearing daughters, Gale and Doris Jean Walker were loving, intelligent, and capable people. When their deaf world collided with the hearing world, however, they nearly always came away bruised. Walker describes hearing relatives who didn't want to be seen in public with her parents. Her non-signing maternal grandfather attempted late in life to tell his daughter he loved her, but afterward Doris Jean asked Lou Ann what it was her father had said. Children of deaf adults (CODAs) like Lou Ann Walker are uniquely able to pass between the two worlds, but they absorb some of the pain of their parents with each border crossing. Near the end of her book, Walker describes interpreting the funeral of that same grandfather for her parents:

As I signed the service, I tried not to think of the words on my hands. I didn't want to get emotional as I conveyed my grandfather's funeral sermon to my mother and father.

Standing there, taking the invisible words from the air and placing them for my mother and father to see, I searched my mother's face for echoes of the face of the man lying in the box a few feet behind me.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. We come here to bury Chester Cooper Wells.” I signed “bury” with two open hands lowering him straight down into the earth—but gently, gingerly. I didn't want to hurt my mother any more than I had to.

No one had ever tried to name the world that people like Gale and Doris Jean Walker lived in. They were part of a grassroots deaf community. Beginning in the 1980s, however, deaf people, particularly in academia and the arts, “
became more self-conscious, more deliberate, and more animated, in order to take their place on a larger, more public stage,” wrote Padden and Humphries. They called that world Deaf culture in their influential 1988 book
Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture
. The capital “D” distinguished those who were culturally deaf from those who were audiologically deaf. “
A large population, established patterns of cultural transmission, and a common language: these are all basic ingredients for a rich and inventive culture,” they wrote.

“The traditional way of writing about Deaf people is to focus on the fact of their condition—that they do not hear—and to interpret all other aspects of their lives as consequences of this fact,” Padden and Humphries wrote in the introduction. “Our goal . . . is to write about Deaf people in a new and different way. . . . Thinking about the linguistic richness uncovered in [work on sign language] has made us realize that the language has developed through the generations as part of an equally rich cultural heritage. It is this heritage—the culture of Deaf people—that we want to begin to portray.”

It was a time of soul-searching within the deaf community. The hearing population got a taste of the internal debate when Marlee Matlin won an Academy Award in 1987 for her performance as a troubled young deaf woman in
Children of a Lesser God
. For the deaf to have one of their own so honored and to have her sign her acceptance speech to millions of viewers was exhilarating. But it came as a shock to Matlin and some of the hearing observers when she was criticized for using her voice (something she rarely does) for part of her acceptance speech.