Reluctant Genius (10 page)

Meanwhile, Gardiner Hubbard had finally managed to consult Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe about deaf education, and had learned that lip-reading was
not
the technique of choice in the United States. Howe told Hubbard that if he wanted Mabel to rely on the oral method rather than on signing, he should take her to Europe and enroll her in one of the well-established schools there that taught lip-reading abilities. Hubbard decided to follow this advice, but he also determined to make the oral method more available in his own part of the world. Mabel’s father lobbied the Massachusetts state legislature to grant a charter for the establishment of a school where very young deaf children might be taught to speak and lip-read. He even enlisted his own daughter in the campaign: when she was nine, Mabel appeared before the Massachusetts legislature as an example of a deaf child who thrived in the mainstream thanks to her lip-reading skills.

Perched on a large chair, dressed in her best silk gown and linen cuffs, and with Mary True at her side, Mabel must have been an appealing figure in front of all those bewhiskered, black-coated men. Urged on by Gardiner Hubbard, Mabel’s audience plied her with questions in history, geography, and mathematics as though she were a doctoral candidate instead of a small, hearing-impaired girl. She understood their questions with ease and, with the unselfconscious enthusiasm of a child who had never known discrimination, answered each question promptly and correctly. Only one question posed by a legislator perplexed Mabel: “Are you a deaf child?” Mabel hesitated, and looked questioningly at her father. Watching her troubled little face, Mary True realized that Mabel had not realized she was “different.” A few minutes later, Mary saw Mabel staring with an expression of blank incomprehension at some students from Gallaudet’s American Asylum at Hartford for the Education and Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb. The students were communicating by sign with each other and, through an interpreter, with the legislators. Mabel Hubbard had no idea what this was all about.

Mabel Hubbard, aged twelve, was cheerful and self-possessed, apparently unaffected by her disability.

As a result of Gardiner Hubbard’s aggressive lobbying (and over Gallaudet’s furious objections), the state government approved legislation for a Massachusetts school for the deaf in which children as young as five would be taught to speak and lip-read. The Clarke Institution for Deaf Mutes opened in Northampton in 1867, with Miss Harriet B. Rogers as principal and Hubbard as president. This was the school in which, five years later, Alec Bell would demonstrate Visible Speech. Gardiner Hubbard would play a lifelong role in this new school, but right now he had to acknowledge it would not answer Mabels needs. His daughter was already so good at lip-reading that she needed the advanced instruction available only in the kind of well-established schools in Europe that Dr. Howe had mentioned. And Hubbard had an additional motive for shipping his whole family off to Europe. The bitter and bloody Civil War had finally drawn to an end in 1865, after a horrific total of 600,000 Americans had lost their lives, and the republic had then plunged into depression in the subsequent squabbles and scandals. Hubbard’s business interests had suffered. It would be cheaper to shut up the Brattle Street house and travel through France and Italy than to try to keep up appearances in Cambridge. In the spring of 1871, the Hubbards sailed out of New York harbor.

Until this point in her life, Mabel’s life had been spent within the loving circle of friends and family. Brattle Street was its own cozy little world: Mabel’s Blatchford cousins (children of her father’s sister) lived next door, and the families all knew the conductors and drivers of the Brattle Street horsecars by name. “In fact, they were little short of household retainers,” recalled Mary Blatchford, a particularly haughty cousin. Everybody in Mabel’s life was so accustomed to facing her and enunciating slowly and clearly when they addressed her that it had become second nature to them; they barely recalled her disability. Once the Hubbard family set foot in Europe, however, Mabel was on an unfamiliar continent, surrounded by people who spoke a medley of unfamiliar languages and who often made no eye contact. She could lip-read, but she didn’t know what the words meant. Her own diction was still odd, and she was suddenly self-conscious: “I am almost afraid of the many strange faces and the stares people give me when I speak,” she noted in her journal. Now thirteen, Mabel had to cope not only with the complicated emotions of adolescence, but also with the dawning recognition that she was different from her bubbly, careless sisters. She began to understand that people outside the family regarded her disability as a handicap.

When Gertrude first introduced Mabel to strangers, they saw a solemn, cautious girl, neatly dressed in the full-skirted gowns and buttoned boots of the period. She stayed closer to her mother than her sisters did, but her eyes sparkled and she watched the faces around her with eager curiosity. She laughed easily, and had endless energy for sight-seeing adventures. When she started to talk, however, acquaintances struggled to understand the strange sounds she made. They unconsciously addressed all their remarks to Mabel’s sisters and mother, avoiding looking at her, as though there were something wrong with her brain as well as her hearing. Mabel brooded on her limitations. During a family expedition to the Austrian town of Innsbruck that summer, she recorded in her journal how she knelt by the sofa on which her mother lay, weeping softly to herself “over some private grievance of my own—my not being able to hear which I feel more keenly now I am thrown so much on strangers.”

In September, while the Hubbards were in Geneva, Gertrude broke the news to her thirteen-year-old daughter that she had been enrolled in a school for the deaf in Vienna. Mabel’s response was instantly fearful: “I won’t go.” Gertrude explained that no one would force Mabel to go anywhere. But as Mabel wrote in her journal, “They thought that if I went there, I would learn German more thoroughly and that it would be much to my improvement; it would help me to speak and understand much better and faster.” Mabel would not be alone, her mother assured her. Gardiner Hubbard had invited Miss Rogers, principal of the new Clarke Institution, to join Mabel in Vienna for the winter to see the European approach to the oral method of teaching. Mabel listened to her mother dolefully. Still, she already had not only a Bostonian sense of duty, but also a psychological stamina unusual in a child her age. She consented to follow her parents’ wishes: “On the whole I think I had better go to Vienna for Mama says it concerns my future welfare.”

Mabel made phenomenal progress at the Austrian school. Within months, she could read, lip-read, understand, and speak as fluently in German as in English, and she had a smattering of French and Italian. Her diction improved. She also made new friends. A young Hungarian Jewish boy, nicknamed Buba, became so fond of her that he wouldn’t let any of the other children play with her. Mabel (or “Mapel,” as her German-speaking fellow students called her) had a healthy sense of her own dignity and value and didn’t appreciate Buba’s familiarity: “I consider it something short of a personal insult.” She admitted in a letter to her father, however, that she enjoyed competing academically with Buba—and winning. On weekends, she and Miss Rogers were conscientious tourists, visiting the city’s monuments, churches, and museums.

Gertrude Hubbard and Sister spent that winter in Paris, while the two youngest girls were packed off to a private school in Switzerland. The following spring, the Hubbard women were reunited in Rome. Their existence in Europe might have come straight from the pages of a Henry James novel: it was a life of luxury hotels and first-class berths in the wagons-lit. While in Rome, despite their sturdy New England Presbyterianism, they had an audience with the pope, which involved close attention to Vatican protocol. Mabel, now fourteen, had shot up the previous winter and had lost the puppy fat from her face and waist. European sophistication had rubbed off on her: she dressed her waist-length brown hair in elaborate styles and never ventured outside without a parasol or umbrella. “I am so tall and look so old that Mama was afraid they would think me too old to be allowed to wear a colored dress,” she confided to her journal, “so as I had no black dress of my own, she loaned me her dress. Didn’t I feel fine! They say I looked twenty years old.”

Life among strangers had matured Mabel to the point where, by her mid-teens, she was old beyond her years. She knew how to mask her deafness; she was unobtrusive in company, and had mastered all the tricks the deaf use to manage in a hearing environment. She was adept at picking up unspoken clues to people’s intentions—subtle movements, facial expressions, exchanges of glances. But for all her self-possession and linguistic skill, she recognized that her disability, once acknowledged, would make her “odd” in many people’s eyes. In her final weeks in Italy, she wrote in her journal, “As I grow older I feel my loss much more severely. At home I don’t remember the idea ever entering my head to wish to hear, but now when I am thrown into the society of strangers, I feel somewhat discontented. Only somewhat for thank God I am getting to understand mere strangers without help.”

Mabel’s family was oblivious to her strange tones, bizarre intonations, and frequently quizzical expression. For her parents and sisters, it was now perfectly natural to face her when they spoke to her, exaggerate their mouth movements, or tug at her sleeve and stamp their feet to catch her attention. They knew how intelligent she was, and also how, to compensate for her loss of hearing, she had developed extraordinary inner strength. She created an island of welcoming calm in the bustle of their busy family life. Resilience and bravery lay beneath Mabel’s gentle manner. They loved her deeply and she, in turn, loved them. Throughout her life, Mabel would always be more comfortable among family than with anyone else.

While Gertrude Hubbard and their four daughters had been in Europe, Gardiner Hubbard had returned to his Boston law practice: there were too many business opportunities in North America to allow him to stay away for long. But he had also kept in close touch with the development of the Clarke Institution in Northampton, for which he had campaigned and where the oral method of deaf education was now well established. On a visit to the Clarke Institution in 1872, he met the tall, dark-haired Scotsman who was spending a month there. Hubbard didn’t have much time for Alexander Graham Bell’s Visible Speech techniques, but he was impressed by his teaching skills. He determined that, as soon as his family returned from Europe, Mabel would start taking instruction from Mr. Bell.

In the fall of 1873, Mabel began her twice-weekly visits to 18 Beacon Street, and despite her early misgivings about Mr. Bell, she was soon enjoying herself. She received most of her instruction from Abby Locke, a former pupil who now acted as Alec’s assistant, but it didn’t take long before she found herself hoping, as she made her way from Cambridge, that it was the disheveled professor rather than his assistant who would teach her that day. He was “so quick, so enthusiastic, so compelling, I had whether I would or no to follow all he said, and tax my brains to respond as he desired.” Abby and Alec began the lessons in the same way that Alec had begun his first class at Miss Fuller’s school when he first arrived in Boston. They drew a baby’s face on the blackboard, with all its features, then rubbed out everything except the elements that were represented in the Visible Speech symbols that told the student how to shape her mouth and tongue. “I like my lessons with Prof. Bell very much, but find the baby’s head very hard,” Mabel reported to her mother during the early weeks.

As autumn gave way to winter, Alec’s study became steadily more untidy. Half-written papers piled up on his desk, next to dog-eared library books and sketches of both telegraph equipment and human speaking organs. As usual, Alec had undertaken too much, and he was now finding himself under pressure of deadlines and student demands. But his new star pupil had mastered the system of Visible Speech notation in record time, and her enunciation was transformed. Alec realized that this remarkable young woman possessed an intellectual strength, a cosmopolitan background, and social skills that were rare in the circles he moved in. Mabel Hubbard could be much more than simply a student. Soon Mabel was writing to her mother, who was on an extended visit to Mabel’s grandparents in New York, “What do you think they want me to do? Nothing less than to write something in symbols for a periodical on Visible Speech!”

Chapter 5

G
OOD
V
IBRATIONS
1873-1875

A
lec Bell and his assistant Abby Locke were stimulating teachers. Mabel’s trips to Beacon Street soon became the highlights of her week, especially since the rest of her life was dreary. Her father was trying to break into the business end of the telegraph industry, and his legal activities kept him in Washington. Her mother and sisters were staying with Gertrude Hubbard’s parents in New York City—Gardiner Hubbard had a cash-flow problem, so he had put his Cambridge home on the market. The only people rattling around in 146 Brattle Street were Mabel, her cousins Carrie and Mary Blatchford, and a couple of servants.