Paul Hostovsky
Paul Hostovsky
Paul Hostovsky makes his living in Boston as a sign language interpreter. His poems and essays appear widely online and in print. He has won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the NNet Awards, and has been featured on Poetry Daily, The Writer's Almanac, and the Best American Poetry blog. His latest book is PITCHING FOR THE APOSTATES (Kelsay, 2023).
Love is Deafblind
When I was thirty and she was seventy, which was around the time the movie Harold and Maude came out, we sort of fell in love. The salutations in her braille letters—which had been coming for some time, but now began arriving almost daily—changed to “Dear Sweets,” the valedictions to “Love, Jolie.”
Harold and Maude was a rather dark, romantic comedy not without a PG-rated sex scene or two, but our thing was more semantic than romantic, and purely platonic. She seduced me with her fingerspelling. She was fascinating. I first met her at a DeafBlind Contact Center meeting at St. Andrew’s. She had the most amazing manual alphabet known as Lorm, the eponymous code named for its inventor, Hieronymus Lorm (1821-1902), that’s mostly used in German-speaking countries.
It was all about touch and the touch was full of meaning, able to express any thought or idea that I wanted to express. She taught me her alphabet the first day we met and thenceforth I fingerspelled a lot to her, which was a little like holding hands and a little like holding forth, but mostly it was like holding that thought while spelling the whole thing out, letter by letter, sentence by sentence, into the palm of her listening left hand.
I’d been studying sign language for a few years and my teachers all said the best way to learn it was to mix with Deaf people, fraternize with Deaf people. So that’s what I did. I started hanging out with Deaf people and DeafBlind people. And I started volunteering at the monthly DeafBlind Contact Center meetings at St. Andrew’s, a little sore thumb of a church for the Deaf plopped down in the middle of an Orthodox Jewish section of Boston.
“This is Maria,” said the director of DeafBlind Contact Center. “Maria is from the Philippines.” It was her first time attending the monthly DeafBlind meetings. She didn’t know sign language but she knew those twenty-six tactile letters of the Lorm alphabet, each represented by brushing or squeezing or tapping the hand of the listener in different ways and different places. My favorite was the R, a little drumroll (Trummel in German) in the center of the palm. The five vowels were indicated by tapping the tip of one of the five fingers: thumb was A, index E, middle I, ring O, pinky U. The umlauts required a double tap. Tracing a circle in the palm was S. A horizontal line down the center of the hand was L. And there were symbols for common consonant clusters in German: an X in the palm was CH; squeezing all the fingers together (sans thumb) was SCH, as in tschüss, the standard goodbye in German.
She was accompanied by a young man, a volunteer from her church, whom she had taught her manual alphabet. He fingerspelled into her hand when I said, “Nice to meet you, Maria.” And then I asked, “What kind of fingerspelling is that? I’ve never seen it before.” There was a little lag time as he slowly spelled out my question to her. When she answered, it was in a slightly squeaky, heavily accented voice: “It’s called Lorm, the German DeafBlind manual alphabet. But it can be used with any language.” How cool is that, I thought, and may have said aloud. I happened to know German myself, having studied it in high school and college, which is what I told her. Her face lit up once that sentence had made its way from me through the young man’s hand to her open, upturned palm, to her enchanted, inquisitive mind.
“Kannst du wirklich Deutsch sprechen?” she asked me in that strange, slightly strangled monotone.
“Jawohl,” I replied, telling the young man how to spell jawohl when he gave me a helpless, beseeching look. She let out a peal of laughter, then insisted on teaching me her alphabet on the spot.
From that day forth we were fast friends. The German connection was key. I proceeded to tell her how my mother had been born in Leipzig, how her first language was German, how I myself didn’t grow up speaking German but I studied it in high school, and also in college where my senior project had been translating Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus into English, with the added task of keeping his rhyme schemes intact. I told her all this that first day, painstakingly, ploddingly spelling it all out for her letter by letter. I told her how, after college, I’d moved to Boston where I worked a bunch of dead-end jobs for a year or two before landing my first real job at the National Braille Press, where I learned braille and worked as a braille transcriber. She was delighted that I knew braille. Braille and German. We were a match made in heaven, she said.
And so we started writing to each other. This was back in the days when people actually wrote letters, with paper and pen, envelopes and stamps. But our letters went Free Matter for the Blind since they were in braille. Sometimes we wrote in English, sometimes in German. Every language has a different set of braille contractions and though I didn’t know German braille, she was happy to teach me.
From the moment I first met Maria—who was known as Pilar to her DeafBlind friends (her family called her Jolie)—I was fascinated. She had the happiest disposition, which was all the more remarkable considering her disabilities. She was full of laughter, that kind of infectious laughter that makes people smile whenever they hear it. She was funny, smart, witty, and very international: her alphabet was German but she was born and grew up in the Philippines; she had married a Swede, a much older man who died many years earlier; she was fluent in Spanish, Tagalog, German and English. She was a graduate of Saint Thomas University in the Philippines where she majored in mathematics. Before that, she had attended a school for the blind in Manila that was run by German nuns, which was what sparked her interest in German in the first place. Later, she studied German in a series of correspondence courses through the Hadley School for the Blind and became quite fluent.
I visited her when I could and we kept up a running, stimulating conversation that we picked up wherever we left off, in English, in German, in person, in letters, even occasionally in Morse Code over the phone (she would speak orally, I would use the push-buttons to tap out dots and dashes which she could just barely decipher with her residual hearing). She knew many of the famous old DeafBlind people personally (famous in the DeafBlind world) such as Robert Smithdas, Geraldine Lawhorn, Jackie Coker, Aslaug Haviland, Richard Kinny, Roderick MacDonald, even Helen Keller. She showed me a photo of herself and Helen Keller and Polly Thompsen (who was Helen’s interpreter after Annie Sullivan died) standing together at the school for the blind in Manilla. I still have a copy of that photo. I also still have all her letters.
Unlike Harold in Harold and Maude, I wasn’t obsessed with death. And unlike Maude, Maria didn’t play the banjo, nor did she end up taking her own life. But we were forty years apart in age. And we did have our obsessions. In the end, when I gave my heart to someone else, is it possible that Maria died of a broken heart? I married my sign language teacher, who was just a month older than me and not forty years my senior. When I returned from my honeymoon, Maria was lying unconscious in a rehab hospital, seemingly comatose. I tried fingerspelling into her hand but the letters, which used to fly up her arm and into her head almost at the speed of sound, just flapped and died in her palm where she lay in that narrow hospital bed. She was completely unresponsive. I wasn’t family so I wasn’t privy to what her diagnosis and prognosis were. She wasn’t hooked up to any machines. She looked like she was sleeping. But she didn’t wake up. I stayed for less than an hour—there was nothing to do but sit by her bed, hold her hand, caress her cheek and forehead—and then I left. The last thing I said to her was tschüss—a double tap on the pinky for the ü —but she just lay there like a corpse. Tearfully, I got up, walked down the hospital hallway and out the revolving door. I never saw her again. She died a few months later.
What we had was quite unique. And maybe a little weird. Maybe not as weird as Harold and Maude, but still, it was weird. I wasn’t obsessed with death but I had grown obsessed with DeafBlind people. I sort of collected them. After that job at the Braille Press, I was hired by the Commission for the Blind to do outreach to DeafBlind people throughout the state. So my job was basically to go out and find DeafBlind people, introduce myself to them, get to know them, learn their communication styles and preferences, and encourage them to attend the monthly DeafBlind Contact Center meetings which were being held in both Worcester and Boston. There was a DeafBlind brother-and-sister pair who lived together in an apartment on Grafton Street; another DeafBlind brother-and-sister living in a trailer in Auburn; and still another DeafBlind brother-and-sister living in Chicopee. There was the DeafBlind woman in a wheelchair living with her Lithuanian mother near the College of the Holy Cross. There was a DeafBlind graduate
of the Perkins School for the Blind, a DeafBlind chair-caner, a DeafBlind housewife and mother, a DeafBlind Morse Code enthusiast. DeafBlind people were everywhere! According to national statistics, there are between 70,000 and 100,000 DeafBlind people living in the United States. And yet most people have never knowingly met a DeafBlind person, and have only ever heard of Helen Keller.
As for me, my favorite DeafBlind person, among all the DeafBlind people I eventually “collected,” was Maria—Pilar—Jolie. I wrote to her, visited her, and wanted to make her happy. I liked to hear her laugh and I genuinely enjoyed her company. I knew she was lonely and alone most of the time, her son the cab driver visiting only occasionally, rarely bringing her grandchildren who weren’t old enough—or patient or literate enough—to spell more than just a greeting into her hand. I took her to meetings and appointments. I accompanied her as her interpreter and guide to a DeafBlind convention in New Orleans, another one in NJ, and also—wunderbar!—to a German conference of the DeafBlind in Hannover, Germany. I even accompanied her once on a chartered bus full of devout Catholics to visit the site of the Virgin Mary apparitions at Bayside, New York, which were well publicized at the time and which she had read about in one of her braille magazines. She was a devout Catholic and had wanted to go—she believed in the healing power of Mary—and she asked me, a Jew from Jersey, if I would go with her. Sure, why not. It sounded like an adventure. So we went. It was a 4-hour bus ride each way, plus several hours sitting with her at the makeshift shrine to Our Lady of the Roses in Bayside, Queens, while she and the other faithful prayed their rosaries and sang their songs and hoped and waited to see the Marian apparition while I just sat there looking up and
down and all around feeling more than a little out of place. In fact, I think that was when I started to wonder, finally: What am I doing here?
There is something called the Rescue Triangle, also known as the Karpman Drama Triangle, a social model of human interaction proposed by the psychiatrist Stephen B. Karpman in 1968. It was required reading in my sign language interpreter training program. The gist of it is this: In certain relationships, a situation can arise where people take on the role of victim, persecutor, or rescuer, and these roles are not static, which means various scenarios can occur where the victim, for example, might turn on the rescuer, or the rescuer might then switch to persecution. Each participant has his or her (frequently unconscious) psychological wishes/needs met without having to acknowledge the broader dysfunction or harm done in the situation as a whole. They may, for example, be acting upon their own selfish needs rather than acting in a genuinely responsible or altruistic manner. The motivations of the rescuer are the least obvious. He or she often has a mixed or covert motive and benefits in some way from being "the one who rescues,” maybe getting a self-esteem boost, or receiving respected rescue status, or deriving enjoyment by having someone depend on or trust him or her.
When I think about the Rescue Triangle in the context of my relationship with Maria, I can’t help asking myself if I inadvertently caused her harm. What kind of self-esteem boost was I getting from my relationship with her? And yet, at the same time, I bristle at the thought of psychoanalyzing or pathologizing our friendship, and I’m tempted to reject the whole idea of the Rescue Triangle and the notion that I was anything but loving, empathic, supportive and appropriate in my interactions with her.
And yet. And yet I think she fell in love with me. Once, on the couch, she suddenly leaned over and tried to kiss me on the mouth. She quickly turned away guiltily, tittering and covering her mouth, and then she murmured “I love you” under her breath. I said that I loved her too, but not in that way. “And anyway you’re old enough to be my grandmother.” It was the only time we ever discussed it. She said the age difference didn’t matter to her. I told her it did matter to me, that I was soon to be married, as she well knew (she had met my fiance several times), and that I was sorry if I had led her to believe that I could ever be anything other than just a good friend.
A good friend. And what exactly is a good friend? “Want a friend? Be a friend!” is the adage that has always stuck with me. Was I a good friend to her? Or was I trying to make her feel good so that I could feel good about myself? What does that even mean? How will I ever discover the answer all these years later, now that I’m almost as old as she was then, and she’s been dead for longer than I was alive when I first met her. I don’t remember everything that was said between us, but I do remember that we called each other “Sweets” in our letters to each other, and we signed those letters “Love.” She started doing that, and then I reciprocated, thinking it was a harmless, platonic expression of affection. I gave her a lot of attention; I gave her my attention, plural, as they say. I think they say that in the context of love, don’t they?
I suppose I could let that question hang in the air, and end the story there; let the final note of the symphony be that rising one, the intonation that accompanies a question. But there is a coda. There is this: I saved all her letters, and it wasn't until many years later that I took one out and tried reading it with my finger. You see, up until then I could only read braille with my eyes—the dots cast these tiny shadows that make it possible for you to see them in the light; raised white dots on a flat white page, like a country of igloos as seen from an airplane. Most sighted people who know braille read it this way: visually not tactilely. Because we don’t have the sensitivity. I decided to try and develop sensitivity. In my fingers. And also, by association, or osmosis, or metaphor, in my heart. I used her braille letters to practice. They were on these small pieces of braille paper, about the size of a third of a page, like when you fold an 8.5 x 11 inch letter twice to fit it in the envelope—small enough for me to carry around in a pocket, and take out often, and ply the dots with my finger, reading her words ever so slowly, dot by dot, character by character, letter by letter, rubbing them, scrubbing them, struggling with them and agonizing over them. I did this for months, years. Until I became proficient enough, adept enough—sensitive enough—to read them with my fingers, and to understand them with my heart, which breaks, and keeps on breaking, to remember her.