wanted, his outbursts became a little louder and more frightening. He'd get in Mom's face and scream. By the time we moved to our new house at 10 Chapin Street, he'd started threatening my mother physically. He was fifteen and crazy strong.
Nobody could understand why Steve turned from the relatively normal-seeming kid into the raging teenager he'd become. We believed he was an angry deaf kid who'd outgrow it sooner or later. But as time went on, his thwarted attempts to avoid school were not all that enraged him, and we could never be sure what would be the trigger.
Two topics—divorce and communism—could really set my brother off. He was a Catholic true believer, primarily because Catholicism taught him that the disabled would be whole in heaven and he was counting on it. Since Elizabeth Taylor was the divorce queen of the era, and divorce is a mortal sin, few things could throw him into a frenzy like fresh news of her love life. If it wasn't her, then some transgression by the godless Soviets or Cubans would make him fly into a rage.
“Why does he care what Elizabeth Taylor does?” I'd wonder aloud during his outbursts. Or: “Why does he care about the communists?” I started standing behind him and chanting provocative responses at him that he couldn't hear anyway. Perversely, it made me feel better.
Whether it was communism, Elizabeth Taylor, or high school, when Steve blew up, Mom was his target. At least once he tried to strangle her with the telephone cord. Another time, as she was trying to call my father for help, he ripped the telephone off the wall. The chain lock Dad put on their bedroom door didn't provide the refuge Mom sought. Steve simply kicked the door open.
With his new volatility, it was impossible to predict how quickly his rage would pass and he'd be the same old Steve, begging my mother's forgiveness for being a “bad boy.” He'd mouth the words bad boy over and over as he gave the family sign for bad, which was a light slap at his rear end—sort of mimicking a parent spanking a misbehaving child. He was as bewildered by the mood swings as we were.
Steve and I began to have our own run-ins too. Once I reached high school, I started to challenge his outbursts. Making fun of him behind his back wasn't enough anymore. I was carrying around my own pent-up anger and frustration because no one “stood up to him.” I was ready to try.
One time when I was around sixteen, we were both in the living room, and he was sitting where he always did, on an ottoman just inches from the TV screen. We never understood why he sat so close; maybe he was trying to lip-read. More likely it was because he knew it irritated everyone else when he sat in their line of sight like that. Often he'd also turn the sound off. If he couldn't hear the TV, nobody was going to. No fan of the medium, I didn't care about the shows themselves. It was the principle.
That particular day I was ironing behind him. The ironing board didn't live in the TV room, but since Mom always ironed in front of the television, that was where I did it. It was Pavlovian. Every time I set the iron down on the ironing board, he could feel the vibration, and it was getting on his nerves. After a while, each time the iron hit the board, he'd holler and sign at me to stop ironing. Finally, I flipped him a furiously shaking bird and told him to buzz off because I was working and had to get it done.
Within seconds he was standing on the other side of the ironing board, bellowing at me, just inches from my face. I signed for him to back off and threatened to slap his face. Instead of moving away, he furiously egged me on: “Slap me, slap me, slap me.” Suddenly, without thought, I surprised both of us and obliged him. Mom ran into the room just as he wound up and slapped me right back, hard, across the face. I did see stars as I staggered but managed not to fall, and Mom yanked on Steve's arm. The shock of it all snapped him back to normal, and again he was sorry. Bad, bad, bad.
· · ·
My brother had the great misfortune of being born in 1947, when the guiding philosophy in teaching the deaf was to force them into the hearing world. Since they live in a hearing world, the theory went, they must learn how to operate in it. If allowed to live in an insular world of sign language, which so few people spoke, how could they ever function in the “real” world? That meant reading lips, learning how to talk.
Families of the deaf were discouraged from learning sign language, because that would only serve to isolate the deaf family member. We somehow managed with a rudimentary, homemade sign language and signing the alphabet. Mom was the best at it, and Mary Beth and I did okay. My father was always clueless about signing, and Mark and Steve couldn't really communicate with each other before they were adults. In the early years, Janet was so young and afraid that all she wanted to do was hide from Steve.
When I try to think about my brother's world of minimal communication with the most important people in his life, our family, my mind closes down. It loses the ability to tread that path. I can't handle imagining his existence and don't want to try to put myself there now. All that does is stir up memories I don't want to relive, since I can't change a thing.
One image that frequently forces itself into my mind, however, and which captures the isolation, is the family dinner, which we ate together every night until we all were grown and out of the house. We're seated around the table, talking on top of each other—the females of the family, that is—and then there's Steve sitting there, watching. He's unable to follow anything we're talking about and is involved only in the mechanics of passing food, eating. But until he changed, I believed he was really there, part of the family, just like the rest of us, except he couldn't hear.
A memory of his being forced to speak makes me quiver. Steve wasn't excused from confession. The deaf were given no special dispensation, although the routine was somewhat different for them since they couldn't whisper their sins through the screen in a darkened confessional. Before the regular confessions began, my brother (and any other deaf Catholic in town) would meet with the priest at the front of the church, in a small room off to the side. There he'd present his sins, which he literally checked off on the sin list. The priest would indicate what his penance would be and then motion for Steve to recite the Act of Contrition.
Maybe if you were familiar with the ritual, you could identify the prayer. If you stumbled into the church unknowing, you'd hear eerie sounds echoing through the house of the Lord. Since he'd never heard sound, Steve couldn't modulate the volume or tone of his voice. It wasn't that he was yelling, but somehow the combination of the peculiar pitch and tone resulted in his prayer reverberating off the walls of the church.
Perhaps my brother felt nothing but joy at being freed of his sins, because he certainly had no idea about the sound. Sitting in the back of the church, however, waiting for his torturous prayer to end, I'd be in agony. How much was for him and how much was about my own embarrassment, I honestly don't know.
But so much for the philosophy of forcing the deaf into the “real” world of the hearing. The first time I saw Children of a Lesser God, a movie about an angry young deaf woman fighting for the right to express herself as a deaf woman, not as a hearing woman might, I sobbed through much of the film.
Once, some years later, I cried throughout most of a weekend after watching it. Twice. Guilt induced masochism? Unfortunately, the book I was reading at the time, about the life experiences of children born completely deaf, didn't provide escape and instead underscored the depth of the sadness I was feeling.
· · ·
One thing Steve and I had in common as kids was that we both were terrified of the Soviet Union and the nuclear threat. I first learned about nuclear bombs at Green Street School. We were part of what is now known as the “duck and cover” generation.
During emergency tests, we'd have to get under our desks and curl into a near-fetal position. Our legs had to be tucked into our chests, our arms wrapped tightly around our legs, and our heads on our knees, to be ready in case the
