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

by Uhlberg, Myron

  My brother’s epileptic seizures were to last for five years, gradually diminishing in frequency. During that time he drank a daily concoction of powerful sedatives—including phenobarbital—which transformed him into a virtual zombie. And although he entered school at the appropriate age, he never seemed to be fully aware of what was going on in his classes; he always seemed to be sleepwalking. As he told me many years later about his school years, “I just didn’t get it.” How could he, drugged into oblivion by sedatives that would never be prescribed for an epileptic child today?

  Eventually my brother’s seizures ceased. But by then my mother’s heart was broken.

  My own feelings toward my brother were complex. From the age of nine, my age at the time my brother’s seizures began, until I discovered the escape that high school football afforded me, my love for my brother was infused with resentment for his ceaseless need of me. He was never merely my younger brother—that could never be, because of the sticky web of responsibility in which I was forever entangled. Almost from the moment he was born I was responsible for “minding” him. That meant that my primary focus was on him and not on me; on his needs, not mine. Needs that in my mother’s and father’s eyes, of necessity, took precedence over mine. With the onset of his epileptic seizures, my needs were not merely overlooked—they were obliterated.

  And, of course, my brother was my complete responsibility at night.

  As he grew older, I was tasked not only with teaching him how to speak but acting as translator between him and our parents. In time he acquired a basic proficiency in sign language from casual instructions from our parents. But for much of our childhood, the more complex flow of language between them and him was through me.

  My first language had been sign. Because of me, my brother’s first language would be spoken. When he was a baby, I thought it would be fun to get him to speak. But soon it became work. During his acquisition of spoken language, it was my responsibility to keep my parents abreast of his progress. After all, being deaf, how could they possibly know if my tutelage was succeeding?

  I loved my brother and felt deeply sorry for him, but I experienced his dependence on me, and his unvoiced expectation that I would fulfill the role of caretaker, as a burden. And while I adored my father, he, too, was a burden on me, one that I often wished I did not have to shoulder.

  Why was I the only kid on my block, certainly in all of Brooklyn, probably in the entire world, who was responsible for an epileptic brother and two deaf parents? I wondered, bathed in the warm waters of self-pity. Why couldn’t I be like everyone else on my block? It just wasn’t fair, I thought. I’m just a kid.

  I had found within myself a state of dull resignation at being the son of deaf parents, with all the obligations that entailed. But my epileptic brother, and the added responsibility that he created for me, was another matter. It was one thing to be singled out on my street as the son of the “deafies” in 3A, which is all my parents were ever known as on our block. Not as Louis and Sarah; not as Mr. and Mrs. Uhlberg; but rather as the “deaf and dumb mutes in 3A.” This unthinking consignment as objects of curiosity, and even pity, was something I had adapted to. But to be minding my brother in the street on a sunny afternoon when my father was at work and my mother was busy cleaning our apartment, and have him suddenly, inexplicably, stiffen, go glassy-eyed, and fall as a dead man to the pavement, was another thing entirely. Lying there, helpless, he would spasm into convulsions, his body as rigid as if petrified, transformed in an instant from an organic being into a stony replica of a little boy.

  My friends would swarm around us, staring slack-jawed at the sight of my brother thrashing around uncontrollably on the sidewalk, often sliding off the curb and into the gutter. All the while I was astride him, as if riding a bucking horse.

  Through some compensatory sense of telepathy granted to the deaf by an uncaring god with a perverse sense of humor, my mother would often sense the event and would hang from our third-floor bedroom window, keening in her deaf voice at the sight.

  There were times when I would come into our apartment, after playing all afternoon on our block, and catch my father and mother deep in conversation. When they were that engrossed with each other’s signs, they were completely oblivious to my presence. If I wanted their attention, I would have to stomp my feet repeatedly on our wooden floor (and risk the downstairs neighbor banging a broom on her ceiling) or position myself between their flying hands. But once when I came home, I was so astonished by what my father was saying to my mother that I could only watch.

  “Why didn’t you listen to me, Sarah? I told you, one child was enough. Now look, we have a poor boy who has fits all night and who sleeps all day. And when he does wake up, he’s never fully awake, what with all the medication he takes. I told you, but you wouldn’t listen.”

  “Why do you tell me this now?” my mother signed. “What’s done is done. There’s no going back. I took the hot baths you asked me to, every night for a month. They didn’t work, and I’m glad they didn’t. It was God’s will that he be born. It’s not his fault he’s sick like this. We’ll manage. Leave me alone!”

  “Don’t talk to me about God. What did God ever do for me?” my father’s hand jerked up above his head and dropped, as he signed “the One above.” My father’s sign for God was abrupt, dismissive. “He made me deaf and spared my sisters and brother. And he made you deaf as well, while sparing your brothers and sister.”

  I could not stand to see my father and mother arguing like this. It was rare, and in some deep way it scared me, as if I had become unmoored, adrift between my deaf parents and my sick brother. I ran outdoors, seeking escape in the company of my friends, and did not return until I heard my mother calling for me from our apartment window. Then I came back, and they were no longer arguing about my brother, or my father’s indifferent God.

  Memorabilia

  Trains, Trains, Trains

  The day I turned seven my father came home from work carrying a large gaily wrapped box under his arm. It was a train set.

  “This train,” his hands informed me, “is the Blue Comet!” Sitting on the floor, he assembled the tracks. Carefully he set the locomotive with its coal car and passenger cars on the track.

  “The Blue Comet,” my father’s fingers spelled the name with exquisite care, “is ready to roll.”

  At bedtime he took the tracks apart and put the train back in the box.

  The next night he came home with yet another big box under his arm.

  “This train,” he announced, finger-spelling the name, “is the Pennsylvania Flyer.”

  Adding new sections of track to the old, he positioned the new train with its boxcars and caboose behind the Blue Comet. Placing an engineer’s cap on his head, he said, “Let ’er roll!”

  It took quite some time that night to disassemble the tracks and store the trains under my bed.

  The next day my father came home with another large box under his arm. He put on striped-gray engineer’s overalls and adjusted his engineer’s cap.

  Sitting on the floor, he signed, “ALL ABOARD!” and sent the Blue Comet, the Pennsylvania Flyer, and the new Allegheny Express rushing after one another, clickety-clack, clickety-clack, down the tracks curled around my bedroom floor.

  On Saturday my father brought home large panels of plywood and assorted packages in all shapes and sizes. He put his big saw and all his tools in my bedroom, closing the door behind him. On the door he had hung a Do Not Disturb sign. “This means YOU,” he boldly wrote across the sign. “Son Myron,” he added at the bottom, for perfect clarity.

  That night he stood with me at my closed bedroom door.

  “Close your eyes,” his hands commanded.

  I did, and seconds later when he told me to open them again, I saw that my bedroom was now filled with a huge table. To make room, my father had pushed both my bed and my brother’s bed against the far wall. On the table there were train tracks going every which way, up an
d down, in and out, over and under, twisting and curving. Waiting on the track sat three locomotives, blue, red, and black. Coal cars, tenders, passenger cars, freight cars, flatcars, and three cabooses. A lone Heinz Pickle boxcar trailed behind them.

  There were tunnels, bridges, houses, and stations. There were grass-covered hills over which miniature cows and a flock of tiny white sheep grazed. Between the hills rushed rivers and streams made of glass, telephone poles fashioned from pencils, and fences made of toothpicks. Toy cars sat in arrested motion on blacktopped roads lined with perfect little streetlamps.

  And everywhere I looked there were little people, frozen in midmotion. My father was good with his hands. He spoke with his hands in more ways than one.

  As I stood there by his side, gazing in astonished wonder at the scene spread out before me, he turned off the ceiling light and went to the control panel he had built into the exact center of the table. Suddenly the table burst into light. Every tiny bulb behind every wax-paper window in every miniature house blazed on; all the perfect little streetlamps sprinkled perfect specks of light on the black road below; the signals at track crossings began to insistently blink yellow, then red; bridges wore necklaces trimmed in light, and the train sheds, no longer dark, displayed their illuminated cardboard nooks and crannies.

  As I stared, my hands forgotten at my sides, unable to sign a single word, my father put the engineer’s cap on my head, signing, “You take over, chief. Happy birthday!”

  I don’t think I slept a wink that night. And I never for a moment thought of taking off my engineer’s cap.

  When my brother turned four, among his many presents was a smaller version of my engineer’s hat. Up until then I had strictly forbidden him to touch the control panel. “Look. DON’T TOUCH!” was my constant admonition. But now that he had his own engineer’s cap, I magnanimously allowed him to control the magnetic derrick that offloaded the freight cars. I soon regretted this gesture, as from then on he insisted I stop the trains every time they passed the derrick.

  As I grew older, I lost interest in my trains, and my brother took over. It thrilled him to run the three sets of trains simultaneously at excessive speeds, until they jumped the track—much to my father’s consternation.

  Eventually Irwin also lost interest in the train set. And one day my father dismantled the whole project and sent it off to a younger cousin of ours—along with my engineer’s hat.

  5

  Heaven

  Although I could not help but resent my brother’s dependence on me, I was also ashamed of my feelings. I knew guilt at an age when most children have no sense of such an emotion. When this toxic brew would overcome me, I often sought to escape to the one place where I could be truly alone—the roof of our apartment building.

  The roof was my personal heaven, my sanctuary. On a summer’s day I would sit in solitary silence, my back to the low warm brick wall that edged the roof, with nothing but blue sky above my head. On that roof, on such a day, my ears were not filled with the incessant sounds of my Brooklyn block; nor were my eyes filled to overflowing with the incessant signs of my father, or the image of my brother suddenly stiffening and dropping to the ground.

  On the roof I would read every copy of my extensive comic book collection, over and over again. I would get lost in the adventures recounted in these stories—the close calls, the speeding trains, the angry lions, the nefarious crooks—and dream I was a normal kid.

  The roof wasn’t just my own, of course; it was communal property. On summer evenings the neighbors would gather there to cool off, sitting in family groups on blankets spread over the graveled tarpaper, covered edge to edge with cold chicken, beer, lemonade, potato salad, cakes, and cookies. We kids would migrate from blanket to blanket, begging a cookie or a drumstick, for no other reason than to see if somebody else’s food tasted any different from our mother’s efforts.

  Tuesday nights in summer were special. As the sky darkened over Coney Island, fireworks were shot up into the sky over the Atlantic, where they burst into incandescent blooms of light against the purpled horizon. On rooftops all over Bensonhurst, collective OOOHHHHs and AAAHHHHs rose to the heavens, in a chorus of appreciation. For once my father’s deaf voice blended into the rest and was unremarked upon. And my little brother sat mercifully still, watching with open mouth and glazed eyes, nodding in time with the exploding of each new pyrotechnic display.

  On one side of the roof was Frankie’s pigeon coop. Behind the chicken wire, sitting shoulder to shoulder on doweled roosts, were hundreds of gray pigeons, all facing in the same direction.

  I would hide behind the brick chimney when I heard Frankie open the heavy metal roof door. And from there, unseen, I would watch him talk to his pigeons for hours. Frankie was not dumb, but he talked baby talk to those birds. They seemed to like it, so who was I to object? Besides, I knew sign language, not pigeon language. Maybe Frankie’s words were making sense to the birds. They sure seemed to be listening.

  After a while he opened the cage door, and with a long bamboo pole he shooed the birds off their roost and into the air. They flew as one, like a gray cloud, up, up into the blue sky over our roof, shedding a mist of slowly falling feathers in their wake, leaving their white calling cards on the black macadam below.

  With the bamboo pole Frankie waved the flock into ever-expanding circles, extending over Avenue P and Kings Highway.

  Not content with that feat of magic, he waved the pole ever more vigorously, until the pigeons wheeled out of sight.

  The first time I ever watched this happen, I thought, the big show-off, now he’s lost his pigeons. Now who will he have to talk his baby talk to? Not me! Just as I thought those pigeons must surely be flying over the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey, and from there to California, Frankie stamped the end of his pole on the roof, and miraculously they reappeared in the Brooklyn sky. In ever-diminishing circles they returned to our roof, where in a graceful fall, single file, they reentered the coop.

  Frankie closed the cage door and told them in his pigeon language that they were beautiful. They sat, pigeon feet clinging to their perch, bobbing their heads in total agreement.

  When the weather was clear, I would go to my roof with my official enemy plane-spotter cards and my father’s binoculars. Kneeling behind the brick outer wall, so as not to be seen by the enemy pilots, I would look out over Coney Island. That’s the direction the German planes would come from. Why they would come to Brooklyn was a question that never entered my mind. Perhaps to bomb Nathan’s Famous, whose food sustained the morale of every citizen of Brooklyn. The loss of their franks and buttered corn would be a near-mortal blow.

  Those German planes never came. They must have known from enemy intelligence that I was on guard, ever vigilant, protecting Brooklyn.

  My roof was not just a summer place.

  In the winter, after a heavy snowfall, when the rest of the kids ran down into the street, I would go in the other direction. Pushing the roof door open against the piled-up snow was a challenge. But once accomplished, I had the roof all to myself. I would spend hours trekking through the accumulation of snow, my footprints the only ones disturbing its smooth surface.

  When enough snow had fallen, I made enormous snowballs. They were cannonball size. Then bomb size. These I proceeded to lob over the wall onto the unsuspecting neighbors below. I was not the bombardier of a B-17 Flying Fortress, and I had no Norden bombsight, but my accuracy was positively uncanny.

  6

  Clothes Make the Boy

  One morning toward the end of summer, my father shook me awake with his strong printer’s hands. An annual tradition was about to be set in motion.

  “School starts thirty days from now,” his hands fairly screamed at me. “There is a big sale on boys’ suits at Mr. R. and H. Macy’s store today. We must hurry!”

  My father, who had never owned a single suit as a boy, now insisted that his son have a new one every year. Every summer, about a month
before the beginning of the school year, as regular as clockwork, the ritual of buying a new suit for me would begin. And once begun, the ritual was my signal that summer was over. Oh, sure, the calendar on my wall still said “August,” but this day signaled that the calendar was lying; I could almost feel the chill of autumn on my bare skin.

  “Time is short. Hurry! Hurry!” he signed with an insistent choppy movement of his hands. “We’ve got to get a move on before all the good stuff is snapped up.”

  “Good stuff? Snapped up?” I mumbled under my breath. I didn’t have to mumble. My father wouldn’t hear me. He was deaf. But I did have to be careful, because he could read my lips.

  Slowly I dragged myself out of bed. I was in no rush to begin this day. A day that would bring me no joy. A day that was sure to be wall-to-wall embarrassment as I played the go-between, negotiating the transaction of buying a suit with my father on one side, and a bunch of unsympathetic, impatient, hearing salesmen all working on commission on the other side. For them, time was money. My father had all the time in the world to select just the right suit for his son. They had none to spare.

  “We’ll start with Mr. Bloomingdale,” my father’s hands informed me. “His basement has a ton of suits. All with two pants. And he has the best prices in the city.”

  Best prices? I thought. Sure, but in all the time we shopped there, we never bought a single suit. Bloomingdale’s basement was just that, the starting point in an endless day.