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

by Uhlberg, Myron

  Meeting my father’s hearing co-workers was another matter entirely. These were men who had never once exchanged a meaningful sentence with my deaf father in all the years they had stood side by side in this room. I politely shook every hand offered, but some of the comments I heard, when I removed my fingers from my ears so as to shake those rough hands, echo in my mind to this day. To my face the men said, “Nice to meet you, kid. How come you can hear?” And “How do you like having a deaf father?” “Why does your father talk funny?” “Did your father ever go to school?” And one man even asked me, “Did your father become deaf because his mother dropped him on his head?” This guy wasn’t kidding.

  My father, oblivious to these questions, proudly beamed down at me as he saw my small hand engulfed in the large hands of his “pals.” And that was bad enough, as far as I was concerned.

  But what I heard when we walked away, and people spoke behind our backs, as though I too were unable to hear, remains seared into the walls of my mind. “Look at the dummy’s kid. He looks normal.” “Lou has a nice-looking kid. I wonder why.” “Hey, look at that, the dummy’s kid. He can talk good.” “Would you believe it? The dummy has a kid who can talk.” Even then I knew enough to be ashamed of my shame, but I could not overcome it.

  Many, many years later, just before my father died, he told me that he knew quite well what his hearing co-workers at the New York Daily News really thought of him.

  But for that one shining afternoon my father was a proud man, proud in his love of his work, and proud of his son, his firstborn son whom he loved with all his heart.

  Memorabilia

  Gone Fishing

  In memory, I see my father’s arms. They were strong arms that ended in equally strong printer’s hands, topped off with sensitive, surprisingly slender printer’s fingers: fingers that could delicately select assorted loose lead-font type and insert it onto his typestick to create words and sentences that he loaded into a “chase,” a steel frame that would comprise a single page of the next day’s newspaper. His deft fingers would then lock in the loose type with a key called a “quoin.”

  These fingers also knew well how to tie a trout fly and how to thread a live worm onto a fishhook so delicately that the worm moved as if it were still burrowing in the dark warm earth until the instant a fish informed it otherwise.

  “We’re going fishing,” my father signed one day, his fingers flapping back and forth like a salmon swimming upstream.

  It was my birthday, and he presented me with a bamboo fishing pole as my present.

  My father with fishing gear: looking for the Big One

  A fishing pole? In Brooklyn?

  Placing it reverentially in my small hands, his hands met my skepticism with a command: “Practice!”

  Practice? In Brooklyn?

  For a week I hung my new fishing pole out my third-floor bedroom window, practicing my casting. When I had my cast down well, I dropped the hook outside Mrs. Abromovitz’s kitchen window, one floor below. I had baited it with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I pretended she was a tuna. I had read somewhere that tuna like peanut butter and jelly. But Mrs. Abromovitz didn’t bite.

  I had better luck trolling for the various pieces of clothing, including bloomers that looked like white blimps, strung out on the clothesline that stretched across the alley from her kitchen window to her bathroom window.

  I got very good at hooking her brassieres. They were enormous contraptions. Attached by wooden clothespins, they hung down from their sagging straps like two baseball catcher’s mitts.

  Early one morning my father woke me. Still sleepy, holding his hand, I walked with him to the subway train that would take us to Sheepshead Bay. The bouncing of the train and the screeching wheels did not wake me as I slept, head in my father’s lap. We arrived at our stop with a jolt, bouncing me awake.

  My father held my hand as we walked toward the ocean, which I could smell but couldn’t yet see.

  In the darkness we came to the end of Brooklyn and walked up a ramp onto a boat that bobbed up and down, while rocking back and forth at the same time. This could be trouble, I thought.

  My father placed my hands on the iron rail and held my shoulders. Feeling his hands holding me in the dark, I was not afraid.

  As the sky began to lighten, the engine roared to life, with a puttering cough and the stink of gasoline, and the boat churned away from the dock in a cloud of black exhaust, heading out to sea. Suddenly the sun popped up at the edge of the ocean like a silhouette at a Coney Island shooting gallery, and I could see our wake stretching far behind, all the way back to Brooklyn. Seagulls followed, yelling down at us, “We’re hungry. What’s for lunch?” Boy, were they ever going to be disappointed when we caught all their food.

  The boat stopped, and the captain dropped the anchor. As the sky began to brighten on the horizon, my father breathed deeply of the salt air, turned to me, and said, “Let’s catch a fish for dinner. A big one!”

  I baited my hook. We fished all morning. We caught nothing. After a quick lunch we dropped our baited hooks back into the sea. We fished some more, all that afternoon, with the same result. We caught no fish.

  As the sun began to sink over New Jersey, and the light began to fade, our captain pulled up the anchor and pointed the boat back toward Brooklyn. My father’s hands never left the railing; they had nothing to say. But his face said it all.

  On the way to the subway station to catch the train that would take us home, my father stopped and bought a fish. A very large fish.

  “If you don’t say anything,” he signed, “neither will I.”

  When we arrived at our apartment door, he put the fish, wrapped in newspaper, into my arms and rang the bell that activated a flashing light in our hallway and a lamp in our living room.

  My mother and my brother were happy to see us.

  “Hoo-ha-ha, my husband, Lou, and my son the fisherman,” she signed, and took the big dead fish to the kitchen. My mother always referred to my father as “my husband, Lou,” not “your father.”

  She did this unconsciously. Her immediate world, her self-contained silent world, was her husband, Lou, and herself. They were the binary stars of their own silent cosmos. My brother and I were two close planets in tight orbit. I knew with all my being that she loved us, but we were different because we could hear. Their hearing parents and siblings were in orbits farther distant. As were neighbors, then fellow workers. And finally, like all the visible but distant stars in the universe, came the vast multitude of hearing people whom they could never possibly know.

  “Your husband, Lou?” I would sometimes ask her, in my poor attempt at humor. “Who is that? Sounds like my father.”

  My mother looked at me as if I had lost my mind. For my deaf mother, in the hierarchy of her emotions and allegiance, her husband came before my father.

  That night, after my mother with the care of a brain surgeon carefully removed every single bone for my brother (I was old enough to fend for myself), we ate the fish. My mother kept looking at me with every bite she took, a smile on her face. As for my brother, he acted as if I had caught a whale.

  I felt a little guilty that they believed that I had caught the fish. But only a little. The fish was delicious, bones and all.

  8

  The Smell of Reading

  Once a month, on a Saturday afternoon, as regular as clockwork, my father, with great ceremony, took my mother, my brother, and me to the local Chinese restaurant for lunch. Eating out was a very big deal in those tail-end days of the Depression; the economic benefits of America’s fighting a world war had not, as yet, trickled down to our corner of the world, our peaceful Brooklyn neighborhood.

  We would dress up for this occasion, I in my newest R. and H. Macy’s suit, my brother in the latest fashion for small kids, my mother in her best dress, topped with her fox stole, and my father in his tweed suit. (“I look like a professor,” he always signed, meerschaum pipe smoldering away in one corn
er of his mouth. His model was Robert Donat in Goodbye, Mr. Chips, a movie he favored, even though he could never quite figure out what the actors were up to.)

  Once my father had examined my brother and me for stray hairs, unnoticed stains, and scuffed shoe leather, we descended in the elevator to the ground floor. After a final careful look at each of us, my father pushed open the heavy ornate glass lobby door, and we exited, linked together in a line, my parents arm in arm at the center, I holding my father’s hand, my brother holding my mother’s hand, all heading toward Kings Highway. As we walked up our block, eyes straight ahead, we would be closely watched by every one of our neighbors, who behind my back made their unfailingly unchanged comments: “Considering they’re deaf-mutes, they dress well.” “See how nice the deafies dress their boys.” “The father’s a deaf-mute, but he has a good job.” “The dummies are taking their kids to the ‘Chinks.’”

  This last was, sadly, an all-too-common term in our neighborhood, generally used by us Jews, the same people who were appalled when the Irish in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn called them “Yids.” And as if that were not irony enough, even to my young ears, these were the same people who publicly objected to the treatment the Chinese had experienced in Manchuria at the hands, and bayonets, of Japanese soldiers, who were of course known as “Japs.” Anyway, I reasoned, in some small though misguided attempt at rationalization, this circle of unthinking prejudice was large and inclusive; no one was immune. The Irish and the Jews called the Polish “Polacks” the Polish called the Italians “Wops” the Italians called the Irish “Micks” and the Irish called the Chinese “Chinks.” Thus the circle of casual discrimination was complete.

  What the Chinese called all of us, I had no idea.

  As for the neighbors’ use of the term “dummies,” I had heard it from an early age, but it seemed somehow worse to me than the ethnic epithets because those words were group names, whereas “dummy” was personal; it referred specifically to the only deaf people the neighbors knew, my father and my mother. Nonetheless I was numb, if only from constant exposure to it, and did not allow it to interfere with my enjoyment of our monthly family outing.

  The Chinese restaurant was located on the ground floor of a row of connected two-story wooden buildings. The street-level spaces were all filled with shops: bakery, poultry, hardware, vegetable, pharmacy, barber, beauty, and of course the neighborhood candy store.

  As far as I was concerned, the highlight of this eating-out ritual was the sight of my father conversing in broken gestures with our Chinese waiter, while he in turn responded in broken English. Both of them studiously navigated their way through the dense, food-stained menu, filled with columns of incomprehensible Chinese characters, alongside garbled English translations. The waiter screamed good-naturedly at my father the contents of the day’s specialty of the house, as if sheer volume alone could get my father to hear the description of that delicacy. My father would just as loudly scream his gestures of approval right back at the waiter. Their heads nodding in perfect smiling agreement during this astonishing performance, neither one of them had any idea what the other was saying.

  As for me, what would otherwise have been a situation of stinging embarrassment was rendered funny, as the other diners were regulars and were quite used to this scene. It was clear to me that they were staring at our table not in disgust but in tolerant amusement. I would settle for that.

  One Saturday we had our usual Chinese lunch, beginning with the specialty of the house (it was always the same, month after month), an inedible, bone-laden, soggy bleached white fish with the most amazing pair of bulging sightless eyes staring at me in mute accusation. This was followed by two choices from column A (always the same choices, month after month) and one from column B (ditto), washed down with an undrinkable, thinly colored green liquid filled with floating black flecks. The meal concluded, as it always did, with a fortune cookie, the message of which, much prized and heartily laughed over by my father and mother, made absolutely no sense to me, although I liked the taste of the cookie itself.

  But this day there was a change in the ritual.

  After a close study of the bill, minutely itemized but thoroughly incomprehensible except for the total cost, my father paid and then turned to me and signed, “You can read now. It’s time for you to get a library card.”

  Above the Chinese restaurant was our local library. I had heard about this place from the older kids, but I had never set foot there, since you needed a library card to enter, as I had been told (warned) by the big kids. They said the place contained every book that had ever been printed in the whole world. I had no idea if this was true. Every book? Why, there must be hundreds of them, I thought. Having just learned to read really well, I was more than idly curious as to the truth of the matter: every book? But then, the older kids could not be trusted. Most everything they told us, every warning they solemnly uttered, turned out to be greatly overblown.

  My father and mother were great readers. Being deaf, they went to books as their main source of daily entertainment. Our little apartment was filled with books, books of all kinds. Some books were filled with pictures of far-off places depicting pyramids, camels, endless sand deserts, giant rivers, high waterfalls, deep canyons, strange beasts, and sailing ships. I especially loved the pictures of wooden-hulled, canvas-masted, cannonade-sided sailing vessels breaking, oaken shouldered, through giant frothy waves. And now that I had learned to read what the words under these pictures said, I had been dreaming of having a library card of my very own—a dream that was now about to be realized.

  Exiting the Chinese restaurant, we made a hard right and entered an adjacent door leading to a steep flight of well-trod wooden stairs.

  At the top of the stairs was a painted glass door proclaiming, “Brooklyn Public Library.” Pushing it open, my father led us into a single large room. The first thing I noticed was that it was filled, end to end, top to bottom, with every book that had ever been printed in the whole world. The second was that the place smelled like a Chinese restaurant. (The library was just above the restaurant kitchen.)

  I could hardly believe that the hundreds of books lining the shelves were free for the asking. As a child of the Depression, I had been drilled in the sure knowledge that everything had a price. Everything. The idea that merely by presenting a library card—nothing more than a piece of cardboard—I would be allowed to remove these precious books seemed inconceivable.

  At first I found the trust placed in me near to overwhelming. I would examine every single page of a book with the care of a brain surgeon before I would dream of checking it out. If there was even a single crease at the corner of a page—or, horrors, a food stain somewhere on the page—I would bring that blemish to the attention of the librarian. And she would note on the flyleaf, in her spidery handwriting, “Peanut butter stain? Pg. 36.” Or all too commonly, “Underlining. Pg. 12.” Even now, many decades later, I still find myself flipping through the pages of a library book, prior to checkout, to ascertain its condition.

  What I found most miraculous about the library was the sheer quantity of words to be found in the seemingly endless army of books marching shoulder to shoulder, row upon row, on the shelves. Words. Words. Words. Written words. Preserved words. The library was a warehouse of words. Words to decipher. Words to learn. Words to add to my vocabulary. Words to make mine.

  The words found in books were in sharp contrast to the words of my first language. Sign is a live, contemporaneous, visual-gestural language and consists of hand shapes, hand positioning, facial expressions, and body movements. Simply put, it is for me the most beautiful, immediate, and expressive of languages, because it incorporates the entire human body. In the case of sign, a picture truly is worth a thousand words. The signs of my father and mother went from their hands and faces and bodies directly into my consciousness. Thus as a child I never perceived language as a series of discrete units that added up to thoughts. Instead, I absorbed meaning
whole, all at once, through my eyes.

  Printed words were another matter entirely, and as I came to learn more and more of them, I discovered their unique charms. When reading a book, I could linger over every word, and sound it out in my mind for the sheer pleasure it gave me. Each word was like a musical note and could be enjoyed both for its own sake and for the sound it made as it combined with an adjoining word. Best of all was the melody I heard in a perfect sentence. This was a language of the mind; sign was a language of the heart. Sign was a beautiful painting, absorbed whole, evoking emotion along with meaning. Written language—my second language—was a language that required the brain for translation.

  Reading was to become the passion of my life, our local branch of the Brooklyn Library my childhood refuge. Armed with a library card, I could escape to this quiet sanctuary anytime I became overwhelmed by the demands that my father placed on me. Here in this musty, sweet-smelling place, filled with the faint odor of soy sauce, I could open a book and be magically transported to the ends of the earth.

  And so I came to spend ever-increasing amounts of time in that library, surrounded by all the words I could ever hope to learn, listening to the music of those words in my mind, all the while enveloped in the comforting scent of Chinese food.

  To this day I often find myself taking an exploratory sniff at a library book, as though in expectation that a faint odor of chow mein will rise off the pages.