I warned him that I wasn’t going to stamp out any more fires. He laughed again and threw another match, perhaps thinking that whatever power was in play here lay somewhere between himself and me, rather than in the flame. As mistaken myself, I refused to stamp out the fire it ignited, and so did the other guys.
Within moments the fire crept out in a malignant circle and we all jumped up and began stamping frantically at it. But too late. The circle swept outward through the parched grass and within moments was beyond our control. Suddenly all was shouting and panic and swirling smoke. I dashed across the field and up the hill to where some cabins stood. I hammered desperately on the door of one, then another, then another. Nobody answered. The cabins were all unoccupied. I looked back down the hill and saw that the circle of fire had grown enormously, engulfing much of the field. The guys were running around frantically, trying to rescue our bikes and get away. I ran back down to them and we shouted incoherently at one another as to whether we should go get help or make our escape before we got caught.
By now the ring of fire was dancing field-wide and menacing some nearby woods. Before we could decide what to do, truckloads of people came roaring up the country road and charged into the field wielding brooms and shovels. They quickly formed a long line at the fire’s advancing edge and methodically beat the flames out.
We had no hope of escaping the scene before being caught because our bike tires had melted in the fire, and we could hardly make a clean getaway on foot, pushing our disabled bikes along the road. A policeman appeared and asked us what had happened. John, as our elder, acted as spokesman and fibbed unconvincingly about how our little campfire had gotten away on us. The rest of us could have told the truth and sacrificed John to appease the authorities, but this would have been to break a solemn and unspoken code among grade 7 boys. The cop took our names and addresses—we hadn’t the jam to lie—and told us we’d have to appear in court in a few weeks’ time.
My God, that was a trail of tears we trod on the long journey home, pushing our pathetic bikes, sniping at one another over who was to blame for this calamity. Police, courts, fines, disgrace, the wrath of parents—unimaginable! Unbearable!
I told my mother the truth about what had happened and suffered no more than her chastisement that I’d be better off not associating with the fools I chose for friends. John’s mother—an enormous and intimidating woman who always reminded me of an ill-humored hippopotamus—gave me a far worse tongue-lashing. She brought out John’s precious Boston Bruins windbreaker, a gift from a cousin who played on the team. “Look at that!” she dangled the stupid jacket in front of my face. “Look at these burn holes. It’s ruined.” Only later did it occur to me that John, in total violation of the solemn and unspoken code sacred to grade 7 boys, might have told her that I was to blame for the fire. We were never contacted by the police and no more came of it, but even as a foolish lad I knew that far more than a field of grass had gone up in smoke that day. I had felt a first lick of the dragon’s tongue and had lost whatever it is that dragons devour.
AMONG THE WORST of my days at Saint Bernard’s school was the morning I brought our little brother Vincent for his first day at elementary school. Within a few minutes I was called from my classroom. The poor little guy was screaming and sobbing uncontrollably— he’d been suddenly plunged into a situation he’d found strange and terrifying. I walked him home and the school authorities advised my parents that his hearing was so badly impaired that he should be examined by an audiologist.
Tests determined that he had profound hearing loss in both ears. He was fitted with a hearing aid, a cumbersome device with a console hanging on his chest and twin wires leading up to large earplugs. From a world of silence, he felt himself involuntarily thrust into the world of sound, but it was a world he was condemned never to fully hear. “With the hearing aid,” he later recalled, “I was able to hear very loud sounds, such as a plane flying low overhead. However, I could not hear softer sounds such as the chirping of a bird, the buzzing of a bee, or someone whispering softly. I was oblivious to those types of sounds.” He was made to wear his hearing aid from the moment he woke up in the morning until he went to bed at night. But the technical limitations of the primitive analog hearing aids, which simply amplified all sounds indiscriminately, meant that he missed a lot of what was being said when having conversation with others. He had to lip-read when someone was talking. As he told me, “I required a good volume of voice to hear words properly; I required clarity of speech. My hearing aids didn’t have the ability to filter out background sounds such as a normal person’s ears would do in a noisy room.” Nor was any sound directional—it came from a box on his chest, not from any particular point in a room.
Vincent was enrolled in a public school with a special class for training hearing-impaired students to listen to words and to speak properly as well as to learn the same things hearing students would be learning in grade 1. But the class of about twenty students had eight grade levels in it, and the teacher concentrated on teaching the upper three grades of students to prepare them for integration into mainstream classes at high school. “The students in the lower grades were left pretty much to play around by themselves,” Vincent recalled. “Not much effort was put into teaching lip-reading, listening, talking, reading, and writing.”
Feeling marginalized and left out, he learned very little during those two years. In grade 3, he was moved to another public school with a much smaller class of about ten students with three grade levels. Here he learned more quickly. The following year he moved to yet another class with about ten students ranging from grades 4 to 6. For the first time, in grade 4, he was put in regular class part-time. However, he was lost in that class because of poor acoustics in the room and his inability to follow what was being said. “Self-consciousness that I was somehow different from the others started with my integration in the hearing class,” he told me. A year later more changes were made: He and a classmate who was also hearing-impaired were seated in the front of the class, close to the teachers, some of whom made a point of speaking slowly and clearly for their benefit. In grade 6 he spent half his time in regular classes but continued to have difficulty following what was said. He acquired a tape recorder into which he would speak, and then he’d listen to what he’d said. He used the tape recorder for a few years, trying to improve his pronunciation. He went on to attend regular classes full-time through grades 7 and 8, and, against all odds, he completed high school, then put himself through university.
Notwithstanding baby boomer nostalgia for the remembered simplicity and wholesomeness of the Leave It to Beaver era, this was a cruel time in which to be in any way different from the norm. Contempt and ridicule were heaped upon anyone whose language, skin color, or physical abilities differed however slightly from the one and only way everyone was supposed to be. Like other deaf people, Vincent was at times discounted as stupid by persons who had no idea what an agile mind and determined spirit he possessed.
ALL OF US kids were now attending school, my father continued working at a pace that would have exhausted most people, and my mother ran the household. She was responsible for all the cooking, cleaning, laundry, and shopping. Her meals remained steadfastly loyal to the tenets of British cuisine. Usually there’d be meat of some kind, perhaps sausages or bacon, chicken or an inexpensive cut of beef or pork. Potatoes almost always and at least one vegetable, typically boiled for far longer than necessary, then smeared with margarine and enlivened with salt. Rice was seldom if ever on the menu, nor was pasta. Herbs were kept on a very short leash, and exotica like yogurt or phyllo pastry remained beyond us. Amazingly, with so productive a vegetable garden, we never ate salad. By and large, the vegetables my father grew—enormous volumes of onions, cauliflower, cabbage, brussels sprouts, broccoli, carrots, parsnips, rutabagas, tomatoes, and peas—were those we’d eaten in England. Questionable Americanisms like squash and sweet corn took a very long time to work themselves into the garden and thence into the kitchen. Also true to British tradition, we never ran short of sweets, as mother baked bread pudding, ginger cake, fruit pies, and scones. She made wonderful Irish soda bread, long slices of which served as platforms for a thin skim of margarine and dollops of homemade fruit jam. Both my parents
