Hands of My Father: A Hearing Boy, His Deaf Parents, and the Language of Love

by Uhlberg, Myron

  As an apprentice, he explained to me, he worked the night shift. It was known as the “lobster shift,” for no reason that he was ever able to explain to me. As a boy, I reasoned that since he worked nights while everyone else was asleep, including fish in the ocean, it must be that lobsters were awake during those hours, and hence the name.

  Being a printer was the only job my father ever had, and he loved it. He would work for the newspaper until he retired over forty years later. In all that time he worked side by side with hearing co-workers, but he never really knew them. Like most in the hearing world, they treated him as if he were an alien—primitive, incapable of speech, and lacking human thought: a person to be avoided if possible, and if not, ignored.

  After an apprenticeship of many years, my father was issued a union card. It was the proudest moment of his life. It was tangible proof that he was as good as any hearing man. Even in the dark days of the Depression, when one out of four men were out of work, he, a deaf man, could support himself.

  And, he reasoned, he could also support a wife. My father was tired of being alone in this hearing world. It was time, he thought, to create his own silent world. A world that would begin with a deaf wife.

  One bleak winter day, while we were sitting at the kitchen table, the rain sleeting against the windows of our Brooklyn apartment, his hands told me the rest of his story, in which began my story:

  “Sarah was a young girl. She had many friends. She liked to have fun.

  “I first noticed her at the beach in Coney Island. She was always laughing.

  “All the deaf boys were crazy about Sarah. Even the hearing boys.

  “There were many handsome boys on the beach. All the young boys had muscles and chocolate tans. They could jump and leap over each other’s backs. They could do handstands.

  “I was older. I didn’t have muscles. I couldn’t stand on my hands if my life depended on it. I didn’t have a brown tan. I would get sunburned. My skin turned red. And then I would peel.

  “It didn’t matter. The handsome young boys with their chocolate skin and big muscles only wanted to have fun with Sarah. They were not serious boys. They had no jobs. So they had plenty of time to play, and make muscles, and get brown skin from the sun.

  “I was a serious man. I had a job. A good job. The best job. I was no longer an apprentice printer. I had a union card, just like the hearing workers.

  “I didn’t want Sarah just to have fun. I wanted a wife for all time. I wanted a mother for my children. I wanted a partner forever. We would be two deaf people in the hearing world. We would make our own world. A quiet world. A silent world.

  “We would be strong together, and strong for our children.”

  Then, just as the rain stopped and thin rays of sunlight striped the tabletop, my father smiled to himself, his hands thinking…

  “Maybe we would have a little fun before the children came.”

  Lost in reverie, his hands, bathed in golden light, now lay silent on the kitchen table. Time passed. I sat and watched his still hands, waiting patiently for them to continue his story. I loved the quiet time we spent together, and I loved the stories his hands contained.

  My mother at Coney Island

  Then my father’s hands came alive again, eloquently describing a warm spring afternoon in 1932 Brooklyn.

  “I knew I had to make a good impression.

  “I had to dress well. I wore my best suit. Actually, it was my only suit. The big Depression was still going strong, and I watched every dollar.”

  He tells me his suit was a fine wool serge that cost him two weeks’ salary. Its jaunty design was at odds with the feeling of dread that grew in him that day as he set off for the apartment where Sarah lived with her family, having written to her father asking if he might pay a call.

  The scene unfolds with cinematic vividness as my father’s hands recount each stage of his quest.

  He descends with the crowd, down the stairs from the subway platform, sweat dampening his armpits, and exits the station into the frantic gay activity of Sabbath shoppers rushing about, making their last-minute purchases for the evening meal.

  The salt scent of the Atlantic Ocean hangs over every shop awning, every outdoor stall, reminding my father, as if he needed such a reminder, how far he had traveled this warm day from his familiar home in the northern leafy village reaches of the Bronx, after one trolley ride and three subway transfers, to the very end of Brooklyn, on the honky-tonk shore of Coney Island. And why has he come here on this warm spring day, sweat pooling at the base of his spine, palms moistly clutching now-wilted store-bought flowers? Today, this very afternoon, my father will meet, for the first time, the family of the girl he has chosen to be his wife.

  Unfortunately for him, my future mother, waiting at home, believes he is hopelessly boring and much too old for her; besides, she feels, she’s too young to be married, there being so much fun to be had with all the good-looking boys who flutter around her like bees around a hive of honey every weekend on the hot sand of Bay 6, their hands gesturing wildly to gain her exclusive attention. And she could not banish from her mind the image of the hearing golden boy whose attentions she enjoyed so much and who said he loved her.

  My father, circa 1932

  Glancing nervously at the written directions, my father marches down the broad bustling avenue, so unlike the uneventful Bronx street where he lives. His hands at his sides rehearse the arguments he will employ this afternoon to convince this dark-haired young girl and her father that he is the one to whom she should commit her future. He has been marshaling the arguments in his favor for the past two weeks. He has a steady job and a union card. He is mature and serious. He is a loyal and dependable fellow, calm in an emergency. He can read. He can write. He can sign fluently. And if she will have him, he will love her forever. He finds himself impressed with his qualifications as he cycles through them. He is an up-and-comer. Besides, he has a full head of hair parted perfectly down the middle and a dandy mustache, and is altogether a fine-looking fellow.

  Fifteen crowded blocks from the subway station, on a narrow tree-lined side street, he finds her apartment building, fronted with a narrow stoop, a five-story walkup in a typical dumbbell front-to-back floor arrangement.

  Up goes my father. Up the stone steps of the stoop. Up the five flights of spongy wooden stairs. Up through the hallway smells of cooking and laundry and close immigrant living. Arriving at the door of 5B, he pauses. His future lies behind the dark wooden door. He thinks: What if her parents don’t like him? What if they disapprove of him? What if they think he is too deaf? What will he do if they don’t give their blessings to his cause? How will he endure if he cannot have this magnificent girl for his wife? He’ll do anything, he thinks, to win their approval. He’ll even move to Brooklyn, if that is the price he must pay to be accepted.

  He knocks. The door opens, and he is greeted by a compact, tightly coiled, unsmiling man in mismatched jacket and pants who waves at him, making clumsy unintelligible signs with his large paint-stained hands. My father does not understand a word he is saying but reasons that this is a greeting of sorts, and an invitation to enter the apartment.

  My father enters and in a single glance takes in the entirety of the apartment. From front to back, cheek to jowl, it is filled with large, mismatched pieces of heavy dark wood furniture buffed to a high shine. There seems to be at least two of everything, leaving barely space to move about. My father thinks this apartment looks more like a furniture shop on the Lower East Side than a living space. Unbeknownst to him, my mother’s father had rented all this furniture and arranged for it to be delivered just that morning with the thought of impressing him, the suitor of his daughter. My father is not impressed. He is confused.

  My mother sits at one of the two dining room tables, and as my father signs his excited greeting to her, she bursts into tears. On the two couches, staring expressionlessly at my father, sit the family: mother, three sons, and another dau
ghter.

  Confused by the abundance of furniture, the stony looks of the family, and the tears of my mother, my father wonders what he has gotten himself into. He finally seats himself in one of the twelve chairs surrounding the two dining room tables, facing the family.

  At once, as if in a coin-operated game at Coney Island, the frozen tableau comes to life, and all the members of my mother’s family break into excited gestures and frantic hand-and arm-waving. They are trying to put my father at ease, but their homemade signs are virtual Greek to his eyes. Perhaps, my father thinks, this is a Brooklyn accent.

  My father smiles politely and occasionally nods in agreement at what he thinks is the appropriate time.

  My mother wipes her tears away, and for the first time since her father opened the front door, she smiles a shy tentative smile. All doubt and confusion depart from my father’s mind. He addresses her father and begins to make his case in simple sign language and written notes. My mother’s father does not understand a word my father is saying. He does not understand the signs. Must be a Bronx accent, he thinks. And my father’s notes are largely incomprehensible to him.

  Nonetheless he smiles from time to time behind his shaggy gray beard, nodding in tune with my father’s broad gestures. Emboldened by the seeming agreement, my father grows more expansive in his signs, describing his position as a printer at the New York Daily News, “lobster shift” to be sure, but daytime work just around the corner now that he has his union card.

  My mother translates what my father says in their homemade signs. Now her father smiles broadly and nods energetically. He feels confident that this serious young deaf man really is the answer to his prayers. This is someone who is from his daughter’s world, someone who will be able to take care of her.

  My father has no more to say. He has made his case to the girl’s father. But what of the girl?

  My father asks her father if he can take his daughter out for the rest of the afternoon. Perhaps a walk on the boardwalk. “Yes, yes, by all means,” the bearded face nods in agreement.

  My mother and father on the boardwalk at Coney Island

  My father and this beautiful girl walk on the boardwalk from Coney Island to Brighton Beach, then back again to the starting point. Although the girl has gone to the Lexington School for the Deaf and is as fluent in sign language as my father, they have said very little to each other. Now they rest on a bench and look at the waves rolling in, one after the other, with great interest, while their hands sit quietly in their laps.

  As the light fades from the sky over Coney Island, signaling the beginning of the end of this momentous day, my father takes my mother’s hand in his strong printer’s hands and gently squeezes her fingers. She returns the pressure with a slight acknowledging squeeze of her own.

  One week later three strong young men climb five flights of wooden stairs and quickly remove all the splendid two-of-everything rented furniture. Rented by the day, it has served its purpose, now that my father has proposed and Sarah has accepted. On the return trip the men bring up the original shabby, mismatched pieces—which come in ones, not twos.

  Shortly thereafter Louis and Sarah were married. Barely nine months after the wedding, at the height of a thunderstorm, I was born in Coney Island Hospital.

  My father’s hands described what that frightful day had been like. His hands appeared to be warding off something. Something unknown that caused fear. “It was a dreadful day,” he signed, throwing out his hands from alongside his temples. “Awful!”

  It was the hottest day of the summer. All of Brooklyn lay stunned beneath the heat. The angry sun had baked the sands of Coney Island and turned the blue Atlantic into a sea of molten red. At dusk the boiling sun continued on its way from Brooklyn to California, taking with it the light but leaving behind the heat.

  My father’s hands told me how he paced the grimy linoleum floor of the hospital. From end to end in the airless hallway he measured off his steps: one hundred one way, one hundred back again. And with each step he signed to himself his frustration and his fear.

  Back and forth, back and forth, past his wife’s room, past the weeping walls, he walked his endless circle of anxiety. He had been doing this for ten hours, ever since his wife had been admitted after her waters broke so shockingly, signaling the impending birth of their first child.

  My father had no thought for the child who was taking his time to arrive, only for his wife, lying on sweat-drenched sheets, in a room he was not permitted to enter, from which few if any news bulletins came his way.

  Some time after the sun set a cold front suddenly moved in over Brooklyn, bringing with it a drop of forty degrees in temperature. The cold air rear-ended the darkening boiling mass in its path. Lightning split the sky, and rain fell in cold torrents on to the steaming asphalt streets of Coney Island. Day turned to darkest night.

  Soon the tar-topped street outside the hospital was filled from curb to curb with the rising tide of water. The sewers could not handle the overflow, and the water backed up, rising quickly above the hubcaps of the parked cars, flowing down neighboring cellar steps. The violent electric storm spawned winds that toppled trees and tore down telephone poles, while five floors above my father continued his solitary pacing, wondering how he could possibly exist in a world without his deaf wife, Sarah.

  Lightning struck oil tanks in New Jersey, sending flames hundreds of feet into the sky, turning night back into blazing day; and the wind tore down a circus tent in Queens, trapping four hundred people beneath the rain-drenched canvas. All the windows of Brooklyn went dark as power lines fell like matchsticks, and my father became a father.

  “I rushed out into the storm raising my fist to the heavens,” his hands told me. “I was a crazy man. A Niagara of water submerged me, and all about bolts of lightning splintered the sky.”

  Over the crashing sounds of this Olympian tumult, my father’s deaf voice cried out, “God, make my son hear!”

  Could I hear? That was the question. The answer was, he didn’t know.

  “But,” his hands continued, “we were determined to find out. And quickly!”

  The reason for the doubt on my father’s part was that he and his family had no sure way of knowing the reason for his own deafness. Yes, they all agreed, my father had been quite sick as a young boy; he had run a high fever and, when better, was discovered to have lost all hearing. The same was the case with my mother, who, it was thought, had scarlet fever when just a baby.

  But, their parents reasoned, the illness and the deafness were not necessarily connected. Their many other children had also been sick at one time or another, and they had also had high fevers, but they were not deaf. They did not have “broken ears.”

  “Both sets of parents were dead set against our having children,” my father signed. “They thought a child of ours would be born deaf. They were ignorant immigrants from the old country.” His hands beat the air angrily. “What the hell did they know? Anyway, they treated us like children. Always. Even when we were adults ourselves. They couldn’t help it. We were deaf, and so we were helpless in their minds. Like children. We would always be children to them. So we did not listen to them, and we had you. They were surprised when they saw how perfect you were. Nothing missing. A regular baby. A normal baby in their eyes.

  “Mother Sarah and I loved you from the first time we saw you. But secretly some part of us wished you were born deaf.”

  Although I loved my father and mother, I could not imagine being part of their deaf world. And I could not understand why even the smallest secret part of them could wish such a fate for me.

  “You were our first child,” his hands explained. “We were deaf in a hearing world. There was no one to tell us how to raise a hearing child. We did not have the hearing language to ask. And hearing people did not have our language to tell us. We were on our own. Always. There was no one to help us. How were we to know what you wanted, what you needed? How were we to know when you cried in
the dark? When you were hungry? Happy? Sad? When you had a pain in your stomach?

  “And how,” he said, “would we tell you we loved you?”

  My father paused. His hands were still, thoughtful.

  “I was afraid I would not know you if you were a hearing baby. I feared you would not know your deaf father.”

  Then he smiled. “Mother Sarah was not worried. She said she was your mother. She would know you. She said you were the son from her body, and you would know your mother. There was no need for mouth-speak. No need for hand-speak.

  My father and I

  “When we brought you home from the hospital, we arranged for Mother Sarah’s family to come to our apartment every Saturday afternoon. ‘Urgent!’ I wrote. ‘You must come! Every week. Saturday.’

  “They listened. They came from Coney Island every Saturday for all of your first year of life. They never missed, all of them: Mother Sarah’s mother and father, and her younger sister and three younger brothers. They ate like horses, but it was worth it.”

  “How boring that must have been for them,” I signed, pressing my finger to my nose as if to a grindstone wheel.

  “We didn’t care. I had a plan,” he signed vigorously. “They always came when you were sleeping. I made sure of that. Before making themselves comfortable, I asked them to stand at the back of your crib. Then they pounded on pots and pans I gave them. You heard a big noise and snapped awake, and you began to wail. It was a wonderful sight to see you cry so strongly at the heavy noise sound.”