“Wonderful?” I asked. “Wonderful for who? Now I know why I have trouble sleeping some nights.”
My father continued, ignoring my complaint.
“We celebrated. Mother Sarah served them tea and honey cake. When no one was looking, your Hungarian grandfather, Max the Gypsy, slipped booze into his tea from a silver flask he carried. As he sipped his tea, he would add another shot. Soon his teacup was filled just with whiskey, and he would sip and smile, smile and sip, all afternoon long. ‘Ah, thank God, Myron can hear,’ he would mumble, as he took another sip. Your grandmother, Celia, would look at him in her tight-lipped way, like he was a cockroach she had surprised when turning on the kitchen light late at night. She always looked like she wanted to step on him. No one seemed to notice this, but we deaf see everything. I see more meaning in one blink of an eye than my hearing brother and sisters hear in an hour-long conversation. They understand nothing. The mouth speaks words they hear but teach them nothing. I love my brother and sisters but they are not as smart as me.
“No matter, that’s not part of your hearing story. That’s another story.”
My father’s memories were so intense, and so tightly woven together in his mind, that in the midst of telling one story, he would often wander off into another one that rose to the surface almost as if it had been bottled up all these years and, now that there was someone to tell it to, had just worked itself free. When he did so, he would catch himself and terminate the beginning of the new memory by abruptly signing another story. And then I knew that, somewhere down the road, I would hear from him this other story.
“On Sundays my mother, father, brother, and two sisters came down from the Bronx. They did not trust Mother Sarah’s family. They brought their own pots and pans. Each one held a pot or a pan on their lap during the two-hour, three-subway-ride trip from way up in the Bronx to Kings Highway in Brooklyn. They practiced banging on the pots and pans while the subway cars went careening through the tunnels. The train’s wheels made such a screeching sound that people on the car barely noticed them. When they got off the subway, my sisters and brother marched to our apartment house, still banging the pots and pans. They looked like some ragtag army in a Revolutionary War painting. As soon as they arrived at our apartment, they hid behind the head of your bed and pounded away, while they stomped their feet like a marching band. I felt the loud noise through the soles of my feet. They had a nice rhythm. The result was the same: you awoke immediately. Jumped, actually.”
“This went on for a whole year?” I asked.
“Yes. They thought your hearing might go away. Just as hearing for me and Mother Sarah went away when we were young. Big mystery.”
“How about our neighbors? All that banging and stomping, didn’t they mind?” I asked.
“What do you expect?” my father answered. “We had to know if your hearing stayed with you. The neighbors threatened to call the landlord. Have us evicted. Mother Sarah sweet-talked them out of it. The notes flew fast and furious between them till they settled down. Anyway, they thought you were a cute baby. They also wondered if you could hear. They wondered if the deaf can have a hearing baby. We were the only deaf people they knew. They had no idea of our deaf ways.”
Thinking for a minute, his hands added, striking each other sharply, “It was hard for Mother Sarah and me to figure out how to take care of you. But we did. We learned how to tell when you cried at night. You slept in your crib next to our bed when we brought you home from the hospital. We kept a small light on all night. Mother Sarah wore a ribbon attached to her wrist and to your sweet baby foot. When you moved your foot, she would immediately awaken to see the reason why. She still has that ribbon somewhere. Sign was your first language. The first sign you learned was I love you.
“That is a good sign. The best sign.”
Memorabilia
A Fox in Brooklyn
Memory unwinds, like the steel spring of a windup clock.
I see myself as a small child, still so young that I am sleeping in my parents’ bedroom. I’m dressed in feet-pajamas that sport a practical drop-down seat flap. It is night. Something wakes me. So I go to wake my father. My hand on his shoulder was my first form of communication: touch. Soon after touch came sign, another language of hands.
“What?” He jerks upright at the insistent shaking of his shoulder, simultaneously signing to me: his upturned hands wiggle imploringly, back and forth, demanding an answer. His face is a mask of puzzlement and inquiry. His shoulders hunch up in expectation of an answer. What? his long-drawn-out sign demands. Since he is deaf, and I can hear, he cannot permit any misunderstanding between us.
What? was one of the earliest signs I remember acquiring. Almost every exchange between my deaf father and me began with the sign for What? My answer would decode many things for him. My needs. My feelings. My emotions. My state of mind. My request for information.
Virtually all communication between us took off from my response to that question: What? With this essential foundational exchange accomplished, he was able to proceed appropriately.
On this night, at midnight, the “what” was my fear.
“I heard a noise,” I signed, pointing to my ear and banging my small fists together. Since I was scared of the noise, my fists beat a strong tattoo against each other. My father stilled my hands and got out of bed.
“Show me,” he signed.
I think back on that exchange between my father and me so very long ago and realize that it must have been the first time I realized my father was deaf.
How could I show him the sound?
I took his hand in mine and pointed it to the closet. That’s where the sound was coming from.
As I clung to his leg, he opened the closet door. There, from the darkness, staring down at me, was the furry face of a fox, its bright unblinking eyes looking straight into mine, its small pointy ears taking in the sound of my choked, whimpering sobs. I looked back through half-closed wet eyelids, squinting in reflexive fear, as I saw the fox hunching his shoulders, preparing to spring at me. His gaping narrow mouth was filled with hundreds of small white pointy teeth. I could feel those teeth shredding my arm.
I screamed for my mother, but my mother slept on, her back turned to the sight of her only child about to be eaten alive. Doesn’t she care? My young mind could not process the fact that she could not hear the fox’s snarling, hungry anticipation of biting down on her son’s soft fleshy arm.
With his hands my father grabbed the fox by the neck and yanked him from his perch. Shaking the fox back and forth, he squeezed the life out of him. Now the eyes of the fox turned glassy, all life drained away. The fox hung limply, tail down, lifeless, in my father’s strong hands. Hands that gently held me, stroked my head, hugged me, and spoke to me. “Don’t be afraid. The fox won’t bother you anymore.”
Throwing the dead fox on the floor of the closet, he slammed the door on my nightmare, wiped the tears from my eyes, and led me back to my bed. As he tucked me tightly under my quilt, he looked at me for the longest time, a half-smile on his lips. Then, holding my face in his hands, he softly kissed me. And I went to sleep.
My mother and her fox stole
This recollection was for a long time a sharp pebble on the far shore of memory. From time to time, as I walked the beach of my childhood memories, I would step, barefooted, on that particular pebble. What exactly was that fearsome creature lurking in the closet that so infected my dreams? Surely there were no wild foxes running around in Brooklyn. At least not on my block; not in my apartment; and certainly not in my parents’ closet.
Many years later I realized that the monster my father killed for me that night must have been my mother’s fox-fur stole.
2
The Child as Father of the Man
My second language was spoken English.
I have no memory of learning this language, or at what age, but somehow I did. And with the acquisition of spoken language, a big part of my childhood end
ed before it began. As the hearing child of a deaf father, I was expected to perform the daily alchemy of transmuting the silent visual movements of my father’s hands into the sound of speech and meaning for the hearing, and then to perform the magic all over again for him, in reverse, transmuting invisible sound into visible sign.
Many years later, as a student in college, I came across this line from Wordsworth: “The child is father of the man.” I immediately understood its meaning—even if it wasn’t what Wordsworth himself had intended.
At times while acting as my father’s human conduit between sign and sound, I felt not unlike the telephone wires strung from pole to pole down the backyards of our Brooklyn neighborhood: wires through which compressed sound was somehow magically converted and transported, to emerge at the other end as comprehensible speech. As a deaf family, we had no telephone. I was our human telephone, lacking only a dial tone, but like a telephone I was available for instant use at all hours of the day or night, completely at the whim and needs of its owner, my deaf father.
In addition to playing this role, I also found myself increasingly called upon to explain sound to my father, as if sound were a tangible thing that, although invisible, if explained properly, comprehensively, even exhaustively by me, could be imagined by my deaf father and thus, with understanding, made real for him.
For as long as I can remember, I always had a radio. Just as I cannot disassociate memories of my existence in my crib from the discordant sound of banging pots and pans, so too there was always music, and the music of speech. My father had decided shortly after bringing me home from the hospital that sound was something that I would learn to hear, and having learned it, I would not lose this ability through disuse. He was convinced, since there was no one to tell him otherwise, that one acquired and maintained the ability to hear by practice. The Philco radio he bought to ensure my constant exposure to sound sat on a small stand by the head of my bed, just beyond the wooden slats of my crib. It was turned on day and night. The yellow light that illuminated the dial was my nightlight. And I was quite comforted both by the warm yellow light and by the sound pouring unceasingly from that wood-and-cloth box. The light and the sound accompanied me to sleep every night.
When I was older and left my crib for a bed with no sides, alongside my new grown-up bed in my very own room was a new grown-up radio. I had graduated from a table-model radio, standing on four little feet, to a solid piece of heavy dark wooden furniture that sat gravely on my bedroom floor. It was taller than me and looked not unlike a cathedral, with an arched dome and a tracery face, like the quatrefoil rose window of Chartres Cathedral, but filled with cloth insets instead of bits of stained glass. Its chunky knobs completely filled my childish hands.
Although I’ve been asked a thousand times how I learned to speak, I have no clear recollection of the process of acquiring speech, that eureka! moment of comprehension. I can’t help but think that the radio playing constantly alongside my ear, from a time beyond memory, contributed to my brain’s cracking the code of oral speech in my otherwise silent world.
Here I’m pushing a doll in a baby carriage, while signing “ girl.”
The radio also became the Rosetta Stone for my father’s eternal quest in deciphering, and so understanding, sound. Unlike the Rosetta Stone, my radio had no visible symbols that could be, with thought and analysis, converted into language. But it did have the light that lit the dial, a dial with numbers and fractions of numbers, and an arrow that settled from time to time on certain numbers, some more often than others. And then there were the numbers that resided at each extreme end of the dial, numbers upon which the dial never settled.
My father struggled to understand how the radio worked. He removed the back and studied the many tubes of the chassis and noted how they flickered on like candles, wavered, and then burned brightly, steadily.
“Beautiful, but it’s not meant for us deaf,” his hands informed me, more resigned than sad.
And yet he was fascinated by this mechanism that was both object and process. “Is sound confined to specific sections of time and space? Is there no sound between the numbers?”
The fact that, after the dial light stayed on for a while, the whole affair grew warm to his touch, gave rise to another set of questions.
“Is sound warm?” he asked. “When the radio is cold, is there no sound coming from it? Can there be sound in the Arctic, where it is always cold? Is there sound everywhere down around the equator, where it’s hot? Is Africa a noisy place? Alaska quiet?”
When he held his hands, reverentially cupping the smooth mahogany cathedral dome of the radio, he felt rising and falling vibrations sounding off the wood. “Does sound have rhythm? Does it rise and fall like the ocean? Does sound come and go like the wind?” I struggled for years trying to come up with answers for my father, to explain the inexplicable to him.
Although my father could not hear the music coming from my radio, he could feel it through the so les of his feet. When he tired of asking me questions, he would pull my mother to him, and together they would dance to the rhythm of the music rising up from the hardwood floor, whirling in perfect harmony around my bedroom, as smoothly as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.
My father was an adult, I a mere child, but as he could neither hear nor speak comprehensibly in the hearing world outside our silent apartment, I became his designated ears and mouth. This began when I was still a little boy, not more than five or six. One day he took me to the poultry shop at the corner of our block, where the chickens hung from the hooks in the ceiling, their blind eyes looking down at the sawdust-covered floor. My father’s hands began to move.
“Tell Mr. Herman we want a fat chicken today,” he signed, two fingers moving up and down like the beak of a pecking bird. Some of his signs were so real, they made me laugh. He laughed right along with me and would then exaggerate the sign. Soon everybody around us would be laughing also. When I was older, I realized they had been laughing at us, not with us.
Our next stop was the vegetable stand.
“Mother Sarah loves corn,” he signed, his fingers scraping imaginary kernels from an imaginary corncob. “But it must be fresh. Absolutely fresh.” My job was to select the yellowest ears with the juiciest kernels, the plumpest of red tomatoes, the heaviest potatoes, and the crispest heads of lettuce.
“Good,” he signed, thumbs up. “These are perfect.” My father always said that, even the time a fat worm crawled out of a tomato I had selected with such care.
“Only a perfect tomato like this one,” he signed, “would attract such a perfect worm.”
Out on the street my father’s hands told me, “Tomorrow we will go to the zoo.”
Magically his hands turned into animals. Slowly they swayed like an elephant’s trunk. Fingers curled, they scratched his side like a monkey. Lightly they brushed his nose like a mouse twitching his whiskers. And his thumb peeked out from beneath the shell of his hand like a turtle’s head. As I watched, my father’s hands shaped the air, and I saw a zoo filled with flying birds, slithering snakes, snapping alligators, and sleek swimming seals.
People stopped and looked at us. I looked only at my father’s hands, imagining the fun we would have and the sights we would see.
Walking home, we passed a man sitting on the curb. “I’m hungry,” he whispered.
The man was old. His clothes were dirty. I didn’t want to stop.
“What did the man say?” my father asked.
“He’s hungry,” I answered.
My father reached into our paper bags and pulled out some apples and a loaf of bread to give to the man.
“Tell him I’m sorry.” With his fist he circled his heart. “But tell him things are bound to get better.” Then he took my hand, and we continued down the street.
When we arrived back home, my mother was waiting by our apartment door. My father smiled, put down the paper bags, waved his arms in an excited greeting, and gathered her in his arms. There w
as room for me as well.
When I was a small child, interpreting for my father while shopping in the chicken store and vegetable market made me feel important. However, even though my role as interpreter was a source of pride, it often left me feeling confused. Here I was, mouthing the adult words and concepts of my father, an adult, to another adult. But I was not an adult. I was a six-year-old child. And in those bygone times in Brooklyn, the role of a child was quite clear. Children were spoken to. They were constantly being told what to do and how to act: “Do this.” “Do that.” “Come here.” “Go there.” And most embarrassingly, as if kids were dogs, “Sit.” The only order that was missing from parents’ lexicon of commands was “Heel.”
A kid’s life was one of commands. There was no room for discussion between child and parent. Whine? Yes. Up to a point. Discuss? No. Never.
But unlike my friends, who unthinkingly knew their place in the scheme of things, I had a dual role. Their fathers could hear and thus did not depend on them for anything; mine could not. And when he was forced to interact with the hearing, my father was placed in the position of a child—ignored or dismissed. At those times my father expected me to transform myself instantly into an adult, one who was capable of communicating on his behalf, adult to adult.
At the 1939 World’s Fair, looking very crabby because I’ve had to translate for my father all day.
Mastering this unique trick of two-way communication—sound to sign, sign to sound—put me in an odd, unnatural position relative to my father. In a complete reversal of normal status, my deaf father was dependent on his hearing child.
Hands of My Father: A Hearing Boy, His Deaf Parents, and the Language of Love Page 3
