The View from the Treehouse
an excerpt

The next day, Phoebe thought occasionally about the young, blind bassoonist from the Ukraine, whom they would be meeting tonight. She was not unfamiliar with blindness; she had known a blind student in high school, Harry Rumpel. Harry had enlivened her tenth grade public speaking class with his witty remarks; the clunk-clunk of his BrailleWriter was the background noise to her memories of that class. He had kept Mr. Bombast, the teacher, coming up with witty remarks of his own, and that was something, because the speech teacher was known as one of the sharpest tongues on the faculty. While the other students struggled to learn how to write their notes on 3 x 5 cards, sneaking glances at them during their speeches without appearing to do so, Harry had no such problem. He could maneuver his way to the front of the room, stand with his hands in his jacket pockets, and deliver what seemed an extemporaneous speech without any cards at all. He had them, of course—written on the cards, in Braille, in his pockets, where he could keep track of which point he had reached with the tips of his fingers. He often just went ahead and memorized his speeches anyway. Mr. Bombast worked with him on his posture, holding his head up, and standing still in front of an audience, as he tended to rock rhythmically as he spoke.

Phoebe had to smile when she remembered the Demonstration Speech the students had been required to present that year. One girl, who intended to get her cosmetology degree once she had finished high school, showed how to comb out and set a hairstyle. A boy brought his snare drum and demonstrated how to do a roll. Another girl had laid out colored squares of paper on the table provided for the speaker, and had proceeded to teach the class how to fold a jumping origami frog.

The day he gave his speech, Harry retrieved his white cane from the locker where he usually kept it between classes—he was escorted between rooms during school hours by a student volunteer, a procedure which got him where he needed to go faster and less obtrusively in the crowded hallways than if he had been slinging a cane around—and brought it to class with him. When his turn came, he shuffled to the front of the room, cane in hand. He faced the class and announced,

“I’m going to show you guys how to find your way from one room to another without looking.”

A ripple of snickers followed this introduction, but the students all sat up anyway, suddenly interested. Here was something (besides read and write Braille) that Harry could do, and none of the rest of them could—yet.

The first part of Harry’s speech was a brief explanation of how you could navigate through rooms, down sidewalks and across streets, by using the cane to both feel and hear your progress. The classroom, a large double one that could be divided down the middle by folding curtains to make two smaller areas, had a front and a back door. Harry himself demonstrated by tapping his way down the aisle to the back door, which he passed through. The class was quiet, listening to him tap his way back up the empty hall until he emerged again into the classroom through the front door to cheers, whistles and applause. He acknowledged their approval by a stiff little bow, then faced the students again and announced,

“I need a volunteer.”

The girls, more careful of keeping up appearances, kept their hands down. There was whispering and muffled laughter among the boys. In the end, Nelson Morelock got up and swaggered to the front of the room. Nelson, a star basketball player, was smart, athletic and sure of himself. It was clear that to his mind, this would be the proverbial piece of cake.

He stood, smirking, beside Harry, who said, “Mr. Bombast, would you please come up here for a minute?”

Mr. Bombast made his way to the front. Harry pulled a folded red bandana from his pocket and held it out in the direction of where the teacher was standing.

“Please blindfold Nelson,” he requested.

There were more, and less muffled, snickers from the rest of the class as Nelson was blindfolded and given the white cane.

Mr. Bombast turned him so he was facing in generally the right direction. “Go for it, Buster.”

Shuffling, Nelson headed down the aisle. The cane slammed from side to side, whanging against the tubular metal legs of the desks and chairs. The girls squealed and shrank back. The boys nudged each other and expressed disdain or admiration, while one or two attempted to put a foot or a hand in the way of the cane, or Nelson’s legs, until Mr. Bombast stopped them.

“One never, never puts a stumbling block in the way of a person with a disability,” he reminded them, “and Nelson is disabled—at least temporarily.”

As Nelson neared, then passed through, the back door, the class again grew quiet. Waiting, they listened to the tap, tap of Harry’s white cane, less certain now, pausing once or twice, as if its wielder were not sure of his directions. Surely he would appear through the front door any moment now.

But Nelson did not appear. In fact, his shuffling steps seemed to be getting farther away. The students held their breath and sat very still, straining to catch the intermittent sounds of the rubber soles of Nelson’s basketball shoes squeaking on the tiled floor, and the now faint and distant tap of the white cane.

“Mr. Bombast, what if he falls down the stairs?” asked one of the girls.

“Barry, go stop him and bring him back,” ordered Mr. Bombast. Barry stood up and darted through the doorway just as a faraway scream was heard.

“What are you doing in here? Get out this minute!” This was followed by the sound of a heavy object striking something, and a startled yell.

There was a brief scuffle in the hall again, some quiet discussion, and Barry and Nelson showed up at the front door. Nelson had lost the cane, and the blindfold hung loose around his neck, revealing a face nearly as red as the displaced bandana.

“Not as easy as it looked,” he mumbled, glaring at his laughing friends.

Apparently, Nelson had taken a wrong turn and ended up a few doors down, in the girls’ rest room, where his mistake had been punished by a well-aimed blow or two from the purse belonging to the girl who was freshening up her makeup there at the time. Scowling, rubbing a bruise on one arm, he huddled with the other boys at the back of class after the bell had rung.

“She didn’t have to clobber me! I had a blindfold on, for Pete’s sake!”

Phoebe was sent to retrieve the white cane, abandoned in the girls’ room during Nelson’s rapid retreat from the scene of his embarrassing mistake. Harry had even more respect in the class after that. He, singlehandedly, had vanquished the smart and athletic basketball star. He had demonstrated a talent that was ordinary to him, but not as easy to acquire as it looked.

Intrigued by the enigmatic Harry, Phoebe had gone out of her way to make him a friend. She talked to him before and after class and asked him questions about his goals in life and what other courses he was taking. Harry was a couple of years older than most of the other students, and had chosen Public Speaking as his final elective in his senior year, at the suggestion of the guidance counselor. He was witty, even sarcastic, in the presence of an audience, but one on one Phoebe found him courteous and a little shy. He wanted to be a pianist with an orchestra, though he was already making plans to study piano-tuning as a useful sideline, “because lots of pianists don’t get breaks and can’t find jobs performing,” he explained.

He showed Phoebe his BrailleWriter, which looked like a small compact manual typewriter with only a few keys, and explained how it worked. By pressing the different keys, he could create any of the six-point patterns of a Braille “cell” that made up the letters of the alphabet. The keys struck the carriage with a force sufficient to emboss marks on the thick paper, making the rattling “clunk” sound that the members of the class had become accustomed to.

“Do you have a Braille slate?” Phoebe asked him. She remembered being curious about this object when she had read about Helen Keller and other blind people.

“Yes, but I don’t use it very often,” Harry said. “The Writer is so much easier.”

“What are they like? Could I buy one to use myself, or are they only for blind people?”

“Oh, no, you can buy one. I’ll find the address of a place where you can order one if you want to.”

A few days later Harry called her over to his desk. “I’ve got the address for the American Printing House for the Blind,” he told her. He had memorized it, and told it to Phoebe a little at a time, so she could write it down.

“You’ll need a stylus and an ‘eraser,’ and some heavy Braille paper,” he added. “They’ll send you a catalogue and you should be able to order whatever you need. If I were you, I’d order a list of the Braille letters and the most common abbreviations, too.”

Phoebe had never seen him again after that year. Her family had packed up and moved to Canada a few months later—not, however, before Phoebe ordered and received her own Braille slate, writing tools, a list of letters and symbols and a ream of thick brown paper, most of which Phoebe still had twenty-five years later. Her children had all taught themselves Braille and played with the tools at one time or another. Once or twice Phoebe had even been able to correspond with another blind person using this equipment. It was fun and interesting, like speaking a foreign language, for after all, blind people saw and experienced the world very differently from sighted people—almost as if they lived in a different world. Their world was, in fact, as different from everyone else’s world as Nelson had discovered back in the tenth grade when he accidentally wandered into the girls’ rest room.