Free Reluctant Genius by Charlotte Gray Page B

speech and news that the brilliant Confederate general Robert E. Lee was preparing to march north with 75,000 troops. The Civil War between the Confederate states and the Union had been raging for nearly two years. Outraged that the antislavery Republican candidate for president, Abraham Lincoln, had been elected in i860, the slave-owning southern states had seceded from the Union in February 1861. They adopted a provisional constitution for the newly formed Confederate States of America and attacked Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. This was the trigger for a far more brutal war than anybody had imagined, as each side violently defended its position on issues of constitutional principle, human rights, and economic self-interest. In 1863, the war was not going well for the Union side. But it all seemed irrelevant to a mother worried sick about her child.
    When Mabel was finally well enough to join her mother at the window, she looked out at a silent world. She watched neighbors open their mouths in hushed pantomime; she saw carriages bounce along noiseless streets. She could see shapes, colors, and familiar faces, but she could not hear the laughter, birdsong, music, or chatter that, for most of us, brings our three-dimensional world to life. The damage to her middle ear left her balance uncertain; she would always need a steadying hand in the twilight or at night, or on a moving vehicle.
    Eventually Mabel was well enough for her mother to take her home, and Gertrude made her way to New York’s train station, holding her daughter’s hand tightly. Back in Cambridge, Gertrude’s three other daughters—Sister, now thirteen, Roberta, age three, and Grace, age one—had been eagerly awaiting their mother’s return. In the homecoming tumble of embraces and laughter, Mabel’s sisters were at first oblivious to her inability to hear their voices. Gertrude Hubbard watched the interchanges between her children carefully. She observed how Sister and Roberta hugged Mabel and started chattering to her. She saw how Mabel clung to her sisters as she stared silently into their faces, then stuttered out their names awkwardly. She watched Sister, older and more aware of the problem, speak more and more emphatically to Mabel as she willed her to understand her words. Mabel backed away from Sister, clutching at her mother’s hand.
    Gertrude set some rules in her Brattle Street home that ensured that Mabel had to keep talking and didn’t lose what spoken language she had despite the fact that she could no longer hear her own voice. Gertrude told everybody that if Mabel tried to communicate by signs, they were to ignore them. When Gertrude herself was with Mabel, she made the little girl look carefully at her lips so she could see what words were being formed. Before her illness, Mabel had learned the words of the 23rd Psalm, “The Lord is my shepherd.” Now Gertrude insisted she repeat it regularly, then built on the words to improve her vocabulary. She encouraged family and servants to stand face to face with Mabel so that she could see their lips, then talk to her as though she could hear. Gradually Mabel started following the speech of others through their lip movements. She learned to intuit what the conversation was about so that she would know which of similar words (“bat” and “pat” for instance) the speaker meant. And her family learned to say things in different ways if Mabel missed the first way they had phrased a remark.
    While Gertrude pushed to keep Mabel in the speaking world, she and Gardiner explored educational possibilities for deaf children. They refused to be discouraged by teachers who told them that Mabel would soon be incomprehensible (one physician insisted that her voice would be “worse than the whistle of a steam engine”). In Boston there was already a fascinating example of the way new teaching methods could help blind children operate in the seeing world. The Perkins Institution for the