Shouting Won't Help - Softcover

ONE

Losing It


I lost my hearing one early spring day in 1978. I was at home, writing about a trip I had made to Turkey the summer before. I had been part of an archaeological dig in southwestern Turkey, the site of a former Classical Greek and then Byzantine city. I hoped to write about the experience in a feature article for The New Yorker. Although I had worked at the magazine for eight years, since graduating from college, I didn’t discuss the story with an editor or ask for an assignment—only for a three-month unpaid leave. I don’t think a man would have been as reticent, or a young woman today. But it was 1977.
The dig was an adventure and the archaeologist in charge a vivid and controversial character. After I got home, I started writing. I was excited, happy, and slightly anxious, the way you are when you’re on the brink of something that could change your life.
At some point in the morning, the phone rang and I picked it up. “Hello?” I said. “Hello????” Why couldn’t I hear the caller? I tried the other ear, the right. It worked just fine.
I went over the explanations that come to anyone with sudden hearing loss. Maybe I had wax in my ear, an infection; had I forgotten some loud noise? Once before, I had lost my hearing for almost a day after being at a loud rock concert (The Who, Madison Square Garden, March 1976). It came back on its own. So would this, I thought. Or a doctor would fix it.
As the day went on, I was dizzy and my ear was crackling. Loud noises were uncomfortably amplified and startling. I went outside to clear my head, but a city bus going by whooshed its air brakes and the sound was so loud the impact felt almost physical. At home, the ring of the telephone was high-pitched and shrill; my hairbrush made a jangly clatter when I dropped it. In the evening, my soon-to-be husband, Dan, came home. He puttered around doing ordinary things—rustling paper, setting a dish on a counter, watching TV, scraping a chair on the floor. Nothing sounded like what it was, and everything sounded painfully loud.
Eventually, over the next few weeks, the crackling receded and the sensitivity stabilized. But I never regained my hearing. A doctor couldn’t fix it. A doctor couldn’t even figure out what had caused it. It would continue to deteriorate in fits and starts, as unexpectedly and mysteriously as that first time, with increasing frequency. Thirty years later, I was profoundly deaf in my left ear and headed in that direction in my right.
* * *
There are many things I have failed to hear, but one stands out from the others. My father died in 2010. I had been with him a lot during his illness, but I wasn’t there when he went into the final stages of dying. The last words he said to me were on the phone. I didn’t hear them.
My father was six foot five, 230 pounds. He wore a size 15 shoe. He’d been in the Navy in World War II and Korea, and was always trying to persuade my mother to join him on a cruise around the world—the sea was the only place big enough for him. During my childhood, he traveled every week, as a salesman. Like Willy Loman, sample cases in hand, he called on Macy’s and Hutzler’s, Abraham & Straus and Bloomingdale’s, selling Arrow shirts, taking buyers out to dinner and drinks. As Willy says, the success of a salesman depends on being liked. My father was successful.
He was also fiercely independent once he retired. He and my mother lived at home well into their eighties, and his job, in retirement, was taking care of her. As he eventually accepted the need for care, the house filled up with nurse’s aides and hospice workers, visiting nurses and social workers. He managed to find humor in the situation, joking as he answered the phone, “Bouton Nursing Home.”
He didn’t like the phone. If he answered when you called, you were lucky to get three sentences: “Hey! How you? Your mother’s right here…” The sicker he got, the weaker his voice got and the less I could hear him. His main concern about dying was what would happen to my mother—his “bride.” Corny but sweet. At eighty-six, she had back problems, heart problems, memory problems. He took care of her on his own long after his cancer diagnosis. During my visits, he’d draw me aside, hoping my mother wouldn’t hear his worries, but not a word escaped her, even when she was in another room. If we talked about the possibility of her moving north with me, she’d shout from the other room, “I want to stay right here.”
Just before my father died, I called to say I was flying down the next day. The nurse held the phone to his ear. “I love you, Dad,” I said, “I’ll see you tomorrow.” As I waited for the nurse to take back the phone, I heard his voice, barely audible: “See you soon.” At least that’s what I think he said.
* * *
I got married at twenty, unwisely, to my high school boyfriend. We split up five tearful years later. I went from my unhappy marriage into a difficult and tumultuous romance with someone involved with someone else. It was the seventies, and to get back at the man I wanted, I had casual retributive sex with other men. I discovered opera, full-blown melodramatic Italian opera, listening to La Bohème and La Traviata, music that elevated my own unhappy life into tragic romance.
I worked at The New Yorker. I had walked in one afternoon, résumé in hand, and said I was looking for a job in magazine design. At The New Yorker, that department was called Makeup, and it was all men. Would I like to apply for the typing pool instead? It paid $106 a week.
There were a dozen of us in the typing pool, known as Walden Pond after Harriet Walden, the fifty-ish supervisor who hired the young women (and later young men) who constituted the lowest of the editorial ranks at the magazine.
We typed. We typed handwritten manuscripts from writers who didn’t know how to type. We typed revised manuscripts. We typed edited manuscripts. We typed and retyped. We filled in for absent secretaries and receptionists, which meant we met everyone who came and went. We were young, well educated, and available. Life at The New Yorker as I remember it in those years was one long flirtation.
As assistants and receptionists, we overheard and couldn’t help seeing what went on around us. Senior editors and writers and cartoonists had affairs with each other and with us. Some of them drank too much. They married and remarried, sometimes each other. Maeve Brennan, an Irish redhead and alcoholic, and a venerable Talk of the Town writer (where she was known as the Long-Winded Lady), slept occasionally in the nineteenth-floor ladies’ room on a couch tucked away in an anteroom. Her former husband, St. Clair McKelway, also an alcoholic, was said to have thrown a chair through an office door.
William Shawn, the august editor-in-chief, was famously eccentric. He was known as a devoted husband and father, yet he also had a decades-long relationship with the staff writer Lillian Ross, which she later wrote about in Here but Not Here. We’d see her in the office with her little poodle, Goldie, going in to visit Mr. Shawn. Sometimes she would come to the office with Erik, the tall, handsome son she adopted in Norway—who we fantasized was actually Mr. Shawn’s son. (Given the almost uncanny family resemblance in Shawn’s sons Wallace and Allen, who have the same sloped shoulders, round faces, and short legs as their father, this seems unlikely.)
The New Yorker offices had doors, which could be closed. The hotel down the street, then a dive,...