The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. David Wroblewski

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СКАЧАТЬ glad to hear that. I’m out of patience with doctors. All they’ve told us is what isn’t wrong with Edgar, and that amounts to everything besides his voice. They’ve tested how fast his pupils dilate. They’ve tested his saliva. They’ve drawn blood. They’ve even taken EKGs. It’s amazing what they can rule out on a newborn, but I’ve finally had to draw the line—I won’t have my baby tormented all through his infancy. And all you have to do is spend a few minutes with him to know he’s a perfectly normal baby.”

      Almondine was up now, scenting the bassinet and their visitor with equal concern. Mrs. Wilkes looked down at her. “Benny is such an extraordinary animal,” she said. “I’ve never seen a dog quite so aware of conversation. I could swear he turns toward me when he thinks it is my turn to speak.”

      “Yes,” Trudy said. “They understand more than we give them credit for.”

      “Oh, it’s more than that. I’ve been around plenty of dogs—dogs that lie on your lap and fall asleep, dogs that bark at every stranger who walks past, dogs that crouch on the floor and watch you like a long-lost beau. But I’ve never seen a dog behave that way.”

      Louisa Wilkes looked at Edgar in the bassinet. Then she turned and lifted her hands and moved them through the air, looking intently at Trudy. Her motions were fluid and expressive and entirely silent. She paused long enough to be sure that Trudy realized what she had seen, even if she hadn’t understood its meaning.

      “What I just said is, ‘I am the child of two profoundly deaf parents.’”

      Another swift flight of hands.

      “I am not deaf myself, but I teach sign at a school for the deaf. And I’m wondering, Mrs. Sawtelle, what will happen if it turns out that your boy lacks the power of speech but nothing else.”

      Trudy noticed how deftly Louisa Wilkes phrased her questions, a steeliness that emerged the moment she signed. Something almost fierce. Trudy liked that—Louisa Wilkes wasn’t beating around the bush. And Trudy could hardly have forgotten Ida Paine’s pronouncement that autumn night: He can use his hands. At the time, Trudy thought Ida Paine had meant that Edgar would only be able to use his hands, that he was destined for menial work, which Trudy knew was wrong. The whole episode had made her angry, and she’d chalked it up to foolishness—her own. She’d never mentioned the incident to Gar. Now Trudy began to suspect she’d misunderstood Ida Paine.

      “He’ll make do, Mrs. Wilkes. I think we’ll find out that there’s nothing else different about Edgar. Perhaps, as he grows, his voice will come. Since we don’t know why it’s gone in the first place, there’s no way to tell if this is temporary.”

      “He’s never uttered a sound? Not even once?”

      “No, never.”

      “And the doctors—what did they tell you to do while you’re waiting to find out if your son might or might not find a voice?”

      “That’s been so discouraging. They’ve told me only the most obvious things. To talk to him, which I do, so if he has a choice, he’ll imitate his mother.”

      “Did they suggest any exercises? Anything you might do with him?”

      “None, really. They speculated on what we might do in a few years if nothing changes, but for now, just watch him. If—when something changes, we go from there.”

      Hearing this, Mrs. Wilkes’s reserve, rapidly diminishing ever since the topic had turned to deafness, dropped away entirely.

      “Mrs. Sawtelle, listen to me now. I don’t mean to presume anything, and for all I know what I’m about to tell you you’ve already read or been told—though from the sound of it, the doctors you’ve seen have been woefully ignorant, which would not surprise me at all. You cannot begin too early to bring the power of language to children whose grasp may be precarious. No one can say for sure when children begin to learn language—that is, we do not know how early in their lives they understand that they can talk and should talk, that through speech they will lead fulfilling lives. There is, on the other hand, evidence that by the age of one year the gift of language begins slipping away unless it is nurtured. This has happened to deaf children throughout history, and it is quite a terrible thing—children considered retarded and left to fend for themselves—I’m talking about perfectly intelligent, capable children abandoned because they did not know that sound existed. How could they! By the time someone recognized that they lacked only hearing, they were handicapped forever.”

      “But everything you say applies to children who can’t hear, not to children who can’t make sound. And there’s no doubt that Edgar can hear.”

      “But what about speech? A person communicates by giving as well as taking, by expressing what is inside. Infants learn this by crying—they learn that drawing attention to themselves in even the most primitive way gains them warmth and food and comfort. I worry about your child, Mrs. Sawtelle. I wonder how he’ll learn these things. Let me tell you about myself for a moment. When I was born, my own parents were faced with a dilemma: how could they teach me to speak? They had not learned until it was far too late—in their teens—and so they mastered everything but the production of intelligible speech. And now they had a daughter who they wanted more than anything in the world to speak normally.”

      “What did they do?”

      “They assumed that I was learning even when I seemed to be doing nothing. They played records with conversations, though they couldn’t hear anything themselves. They bought a radio, and asked their hearing friends to tell them which stations to tune in, and when. They watched my mouth to see if I was making sounds. They arranged for me to spend time with people who could play with me and speak to me. In short, Mrs. Sawtelle, they made sure that verbal language was available to me in every way they could imagine.”

      “But there must have been more to it than that. How did they respond when you spoke your first words? How did they encourage you when they couldn’t hear you speak?”

      Mrs. Wilkes talked then about the readiness of babies to learn language, how impossible it was to prevent, so long as examples were available. How isolated twins sometimes invented private languages. She went on for quite some time. She had worked with both deaf children and the hearing children of deaf parents, she said, and there was a simple principle: the baby wanted to communicate. It would learn whatever was given as an example, whether English, French, German, Chinese, or sign. As a child, she had learned to sign as well as speak, almost effortlessly. This last point, she said, was most significant for the Sawtelle baby.

      “But how can I teach him to sign?” Trudy said. “I don’t know how myself.”

      “Then you will learn, together,” Mrs. Wilkes said. “At first, you only need to know enough to talk with Edgar in the simplest ways.”

      “Which are?”

      “Which are to tell him you love him. To say, here is food. To name things: Dog. Bird. Daddy. Mama. Sky. Cloud. Just like any child. Show him how to ask for things he wants by moving his hands in that sign. Show him how to ask for more of whatever he wants”—and here she bounced the fingertips of both hands together as she talked, to demonstrate—“and later, when the time comes to make sentences, you’ll already have learned how to do that.”

      Their conversation went on late into the evening. When Gar came in from the kennel, Mrs. Wilkes began demonstrating the basics. She said she could explain a few signs and straightforward syntax in an evening, and she began with simple СКАЧАТЬ