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

by Uhlberg, Myron

  “Who knows?” my father added. “If we’re lucky, we’ll find a two-for-one sale.”

  At the end of two subway rides that took us from the far reaches of the oceanside fringe of Brooklyn to the treeless streets of Manhattan, we exited the station into a world far different from the one we had left behind. Lexington Avenue and 59th Street on the island of Manhattan was to West Ninth Street at the outer edge of Brooklyn “as different as St. Petersburg was to Odessa,” my grandmother Celia always said. That is, when she said anything at all.

  Holding my hand, my father marched me across Lexington Avenue, already clogged with trucks and cabs manned by sweating and swearing drivers, their bleating horns and curses falling unheard on my father’s deaf ears. Safely arriving on the other side of the avenue, my father dropped my hand, and now, freed from my grasp, his hands flung excitement in every direction. “What a great day this is! Me with my son Myron, out to buy a suit. A beautiful day. Listen! Can you hear the sunshine sound on the ladies’ red dress in the window? And look at the light of the sunshine! See how it breaks up into diamonds in the puddle at the curb! Smell the exhaust from the automobiles! Can you taste it on the back of your tongue?”

  For my father, who could not hear, every other sense was heightened to compensate for his loss. He even claimed to “hear” the sound of color.

  Leaving the sunlit street, we descended into the artificial light of Bloomingdale’s basement. That’s where the two-for-one suits were located. And there were thousands of them hanging in that vast, poorly lit room. I could swear my father licked his lips in anticipation at the sight of all that wool.

  Being ever practical by nature, he always began by instructing me to try on the suits that were sewn of the heaviest wool fabrics. Pattern didn’t matter: plaids, stripes, herringbone. Weave was not an issue: serge, gabardine, worsted. Price was of no concern. Nothing mattered except sheer weight.

  “These are great,” his hands assured me, while his mobile face accompanied his happy hands with a big self-satisfied smile.

  “These are bulletproof suits.”

  “Great,” my doubting hands said. “These suits would serve me well in the invasion of Europe. What German soldier would shoot at a kid from Brooklyn wearing a plaid suit like this? And if he did, how surprised he’d be when the bullets bounced off the lapels.”

  I could tell by my father’s expression that my jokes fell flat. They did not deter him at all. His only response was “Follow me.”

  Off to the dressing room we went, my father with ten wool suits clutched to his chest, me following dutifully behind. The way his arms drooped, I figured the suits must have weighed about a hundred pounds.

  “Where is a salesman?” my father signed in the suddenly deserted room. “They’re never around when you need one.”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell my father that at the sight of us, every salesman in the place had scurried off, as the cockroaches did late at night when I turned on the light in our kitchen to get a glass of water. Our fruitless, sales-less annual visits had not been forgotten by those who worked on commission: no sale, no commission. Every summer in came my father, and off ran the salesmen.

  “Never mind,” my father signed. “I know Mr. Bloomingdale’s inventory like I know the contents of my closet. It never changes.”

  Suit after suit I tried on. Modeling each one for my father while being rotated by him, like a chicken on a spit, I stood in front of a huge tilted floor mirror.

  “Not right,” he said. “Bunches up in the back. Makes you look like a little hunchback man. The same as in that sad movie. You know, the man who rings the church bell. Try this one next.

  “Too tight. Try the next one.

  “Plaid makes you look fat. Now you look like a little fat man-boy. Like Lou Costello.” He laughed, but as my father looked not in the least like Bud Abbott, I did not join in his hilarity. Actually, by then I usually felt like crying.

  “Try this one.

  “The stripes make you look like a string bean boy. Green suit makes you look good enough to eat. Like a vegetable. Maybe we’ll take you home and Mother Sarah will cook son Myron in his new green string bean suit.”

  Oh, what a day this would be! His jokes were as unfunny to me as mine had been to him.

  “Try this one on next.”

  Suit after itchy wool suit I tried on and modeled for my father.

  None were satisfactory to his eye.

  Hours passed. Suit after suit was plucked off the rack and brought to me in the dressing room. Suit after suit took its place on the dressing room wall, then the dressing room bench, and finally, stacked up neatly, on the dressing room floor.

  When my father had exhausted every single suit in my size, as well as sizes I could never grow into before they went out of style—if they had ever been in style—he threw up his hands, announcing, “Well, that’s it for Mr. Bloomingdale. He had his chance. We gave him first crack.”

  “But we never, ever buy a suit from Bloomingdale’s,” I pointed out to him. “We come here every year. I try on every suit they have in my size, even sizes too large for me. ‘You’ll grow into this someday,’ you say. And after all those solids and plaids and stripes and herringbones, you always say, ‘Well, that’s it for Mr. Bloomingdale.’”

  “Quality,” he signed patiently, as if explaining to a backward child. “That’s what we’re after. Only the very best suit is good enough for my son Myron.”

  Holding my hand in his left hand while signing abbreviated signs with his right, my father launched us into the stream of traffic on Lexington Avenue.

  “Next stop, Mr. R. and H. Macy. Largest store in the world.” I looked at the expansiveness of my father’s sign as he let go of me for a moment, his hands spread wide describing the size of R. H. Macy, and my heart dropped at the mere thought of the visit.

  Safely on the other side of the avenue, after my father had stared down a fast-approaching taxi, daring it to hit us, we boarded a bus, then ducked into the subway for a short ride downtown.

  Climbing out of the station at 34th Street, we stood at the entrance to the home of Mr. R. and H. Macy. An enormous place, it occupied an entire square block, street to street, avenue to avenue. I couldn’t begin to imagine how many suits in my size it might contain. I wondered if Mr. R. and H. Macy was open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. There was no way we could get through all the suits in this place before school started.

  With a look of fierce determination on his face, my father took my hand. We whirled into the store through the giant revolving door. Along with a score of other shoppers, we were swept into a waiting elevator, which rose with a sudden acceleration, before quickly dumping us into the middle of the suit department.

  In my new R. & H. Macy suit

  Spread out before us was a vast ocean of suits, row upon endless row, quite possibly all the suits that had ever been made, except for those poor two-pants-per-jacket versions hanging in Mr. Bloomingdale’s emporium, which had utterly failed my father’s quality test.

  The thought of the sheer quantity of sheep that had been clipped to produce the wool that had been woven into the cloth that was used to make these endless flocks of suits staggered my imagination. In my mind’s eye, I could see all those poor, cold, naked, shivering sheep huddled together on a grassy hill somewhere in Scotland, trying to stay warm.

  I glanced up at my father and saw a look of pure happiness spread across his face, which soon gave way to a mask of determined yet optimistic resolve.

  Taking a firm grip on my hand, he waded bravely into the oncoming waves of hanging suits, stretching out to the horizon of banked elevators, with me following haplessly in his wake.

  Now the second act of this dreadful play began—and this would also be a long one, as Mr. R. and H. Macy had if possible even more suits than Mr. Bloomingdale, and even fewer salesmen in evidence, for the clothing salesmen in Macy’s also saw my father coming and if anything ran faster than those at Bloo
mingdale’s. Undaunted, as resolute as Richard Burton seeking the source of the Nile, my father trudged forward, leading me by the hand as if I were John Hanning Speke: By God, we’ll find the source of the Nile or die trying.

  Once we had returned to our neighborhood at the end of one of these epic days, the annual purchase held securely in the hands of my triumphant father, the third act of our annual drama would begin. As we exited the Sea Beach line subway stop at Kings Highway, my father would sign, “You’ve been a good boy today. I’m proud of you. You were a big help to me. And you were fun company. Now for your reward.”

  Our neighborhood candy store was our Arabian Nights Bazaar, containing not just candy but other delights, some of them ordinary and practical, some exotic. Here we bought our brand-new spaldeens (when we had split the old one in two, with a perfectly executed swing of a sawed-off broomstick) and chocolate Kisses in their silver wrappers. Button candy, dripped as dots onto tissue-thin paper, was sold by the inch, each multicolored sugary button to be sucked singly into our greedy mouths and savored (when we weren’t trying to extract the bits of paper stuck on the backs of the buttons from between our teeth). The most exciting purchase of all was the wax lips. Ruby red, perfectly molded, and shaped into a perpetual pouty smile in wax, they were as flavorful as a Yahrzeit candle. But with these bulbous red lips clenched firmly between our front teeth, we kids would parade gleefully around the neighborhood, pressing our faces into the thighs of every grown-up we encountered. The why of it all escapes me to this day.

  “Choose anything you want,” my father signed. “Even two things today.”

  Wow, I thought. Where do I begin?

  My father was the model of patience. “Take your time,” he said. And so in unconscious imitation of him in the department stores, I looked at every comic book in the candy store, handled every small toy, and fingered every small trinket except for that near-universal favorite, the tin clicking frog. Every kid in Brooklyn knew that by repeatedly clicking a clicking frog, they could drive their parents nuts in five minutes flat. But that didn’t work with mine, of course. Finally I settled on a Batman comic and a set of wax lips. “I’ll wear them when we get home,” I told my father. “Mother won’t recognize me.” My father smiled at the image of me walking through our front door, smiling like an idiot at my mother with my ruby-red lips.

  “Can we get a set for Irwin?” I asked my father. “That way Mother will be doubly surprised.”

  Readily agreeing, my father, like the great director he was, staged the conclusion of the final act: egg cream sodas for both of us. And so the curtain came down, the play was over: I had my new suit, and he had his day alone with his son.

  7

  A Day in the City

  I had never gotten closer to where my father worked than the feeling of a newspaper hat on my head, which he made from the paper he brought home every evening. But one day when he was on vacation, he took me to the New York Daily News building.

  That morning he selected the clothes I would wear—that year’s new suit, of course. Then he dressed himself in his best clothes and freshly polished shoes. After kissing my mother and brother goodbye, we went down into the street. As dressed up as I had ever seen him, hat rakishly angled on his head, he took my hand in his, and we walked to the Kings Highway stop on the BMT subway, where we descended the stairs and stood on the platform for the train to Manhattan. As we waited for the train to arrive, I couldn’t help but notice how happy my father seemed.

  The train took us into the city, where we transferred to another train, which took us to a stop near my father’s workplace.

  Exiting the subway, my father took my hand and urged me to walk faster. Soon we arrived in front of the New York Daily News building.

  I stood with my father outside the ornate, glass-covered entrance to the lobby. No matter how far backward I bent, I simply could not see the top of the building. Leaning back as far as my spine would allow, I struggled in vain to see the top of this snow-white tower. The rows of vertical white-brick panels rose from the city sidewalk, where I stood in my heavily shined shoes, straight up into a limitless blue sky, where they seemed to merge into a single point, thirty-seven floors above my head. Blimpy white clouds looked like fat dirigibles sailing slowly overhead, preparing to dock on the roof, just as real zeppelins once did on the roof of the Empire State Building.

  Pushing our way through the revolving door, we entered the splendor of the high-domed lobby of the New York Daily News. I had never seen anything like it. The vast space was dark, lit in strategic spots by recessed lighting. The floor we stood on was of slick terrazzo squares. And there in front of me, sitting halfway down a wide deep hole, behind a chrome railing, revolved an enormous globe. The globe spun on its axis, basking in the rays shed by the soft spotlights positioned overhead; it was illuminated from below by the lights shining from a circle of glass steps that rose out of the depths to the brass belt around the equator.

  It was a solitary, endlessly spinning object, bathed in light, in the otherwise dark lobby. My first sight of that magnificent spinning ball, which represented the earth where I lived, took my breath away. Every known country was outlined in bright colors. Every city, noted. The seven blue oceans divided the continents. The North Pole whitely capped the top of the revolving globe, while its distant relative, the South Pole, completed the picture deep down in the well. I was awestruck, although I later learned that the genius who had designed this magnificent spectacle had set the globe to turning in the wrong direction when it was initially installed.

  As I stared in amazement, I began to wonder where my block was. And for that matter, where was Brooklyn? I then realized what a giant ball would be necessary to show West Ninth Street. It would have to be at least the size of the Wonder Wheel in Coney Island. And—my imagination was in full flight now—the lobby that housed such a globe would have to be the size of…what? I simply couldn’t imagine. As for the size of the building that could house the lobby that contained a globe the size of the Wonder Wheel—I had reached the outer limit of what even my fervid imagination was capable of.

  “Nice,” I signed.

  After I’d had my fill of the lobby, we rode the elevator, ascending in a stomach-dropping whoosh to the floor on which my father worked. The elevator car stopped with a suddenness that threatened to bring up my breakfast.

  From the moment I left the quiet of the elevator car, and penetrated the wall of sound that greeted me when we arrived at the printing press floor, I literally could not hear myself think. The noise was deafening. For the remainder of my visit that day I hardly ever took my fingers out of my ears.

  In the enormous pressroom seven printing presses, each as big as a two-story house, were pounding away, printing sixty thousand copies of the Daily News an hour. These vast two-storied Rube Goldberg affairs were a mind-boggling collection of wheels, struts, rollers, and chains, into one end of which giant rolls of blank white paper were fed, eventually to be spat out in the form of finished newspapers at the other end.

  Regardless of how far I stuffed my fingers into my eardrums, I simply could not shut out the sound of those presses. And the sound was not just in my ears, for the thundering rumble that rose up from the wood and concrete floor went straight up my legs and through my spine. I imagined this was what it would be like to be standing on an African plain, with a thousand elephants running past me in fear of their lives.

  From work station to work station my father led me, showing off his son to each of his colleagues.

  While the presses were running, the deaf pressmen wore newspaper hats on their hair (to protect them from the mist of ink that rose off the presses) and smiles of a job well done on their faces. Their hearing co-workers, cotton wadding plugged into their ears, wore matching newspaper hats on their heads but pained expressions on their faces. Now I understood why my father and his deaf pals had been hired, and were valued, by Captain Patterson.

  When the presses shuddered to a st
op and the last copy of the day’s newspaper came down the conveyer belt, my father waved goodbye to his co-workers in the pressroom and marched me off to the composing room, which was where he worked. This huge space housed row upon row upon row of chattering linotype machines, manned by row upon row of workers. Here there was a different sound. Unlike the rolling rumble of panicked elephants in the pressroom, the composing room was filled with the sound of metal clanging on metal, which brought to mind a jungle crowded with monkeys in full cry. Back into my ears went my fingers.

  The workers stood shoulder to shoulder, their nimble fingers extracting lead-font type from the drawers of waist-high metal cases, manipulating them with great dexterity into steel frames. Every so often a lead slug containing a group of words, or an advertisement that had been produced on a linotype machine, was dropped in alongside the loose letters of type. When the “page” was completed, the whole affair was locked into place with a metal key.

  This was where my father stood five days a week, year after year, from the beginning to the end of his working life. Hunched over his work station, eyeshades protecting his eyes from the murderous glare of the overhead fluorescent strips of light, my father labored, turning lead-type letters into words and sentences. He loved his work.

  Pushing me in front of him, he led me forward to meet his deaf pals, who immediately stopped their work and greeted me with warmth, each vying for my attention by making large exaggerated signs. My father told me later that his deaf friends were comparing my signing ability with that of their own children of a similar age. He told me I had done well in their eyes, as some of them had children who didn’t sign very proficiently. This was usually the case with the second child (in those days two kids was the norm), because that child was not required to be the family interpreter. The exception, he explained, was when the second child was a girl, as girls tended to be better signers than boys. (My father told my mother that night, when he recapped the day for her, that Myron had received a great compliment from his pals—he signed like a girl. Seeing my father’s hands sign “same as a girl,” my brother laughed out loud. I, on the other hand, found no humor in the “compliment.”)