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

by Uhlberg, Myron

  Then the unthinkable happened. A Cardinal batter, racing down the first-base line in an impossible attempt to beat out a ground ball, intentionally spiked Jackie’s leg, long after the ball had arrived in his glove.

  Twenty-six thousand Brooklyn fans leaped to their feet, and the stands erupted in protest. Cries of outrage poured from twenty-six thousand mouths, swirled up the aisles, bounced off the girders, and reverberated against the roof.

  “JACKIEE! JACKIEE! JACKIEE!” they screamed.

  My father’s shouts of “AH-GHEE! AH-GHEE! AH-GHEE!” went unheard in the Niagara of sound.

  Jackie Robinson just stood there on first base, bright red blood streaming down his leg, with a face that looked as if it had been carved in black marble.

  Later that day Jackie got another hit off the Cardinal pitcher, and the fans went nuts.

  “JACKIEE! JACKIEE! JACKIEE!”

  “AH-GHEE! AH-GHEE! AH-GHEE!”

  This time the fans in the neighboring seats looked at my father. He must surely have been aware of their stares, but he kept his eyes locked on Jackie, who was beginning to edge off second base. I looked at my feet.

  On the subway ride home my father signed, “I am a deaf man in a hearing world. All the time I must show hearing people that I am a man as well. A man as good as them. Maybe even better.”

  The subway car was packed. As usual, people in the car stared at my father with mixed looks of curiosity, shock, and even revulsion. I paid no attention to them as I watched his hands.

  “Jackie Robinson is a black man in the white man’s baseball world. All the time he must show white people that he is a man. A man as good as them. Maybe even better. No matter that his skin is a black color. The color of his skin is not important. Only what Jackie does on the ball field is important.”

  Just when I thought my father had finished speaking, his hands spoke to me sorrowfully. “Very hard for a deaf man. Very hard for a black man. Must fight all the time. No rest. Never. Sad.”

  My father didn’t sign another word. He just stared into the eyes of the subway riders looking rudely at him, until they sheepishly broke off eye contact—every last one of them.

  We went to many more home games during that summer of 1947. Somehow my father always got box-seat tickets along the first-base line. To this day I can hear with perfect clarity his delighted cries of “AH-GHEE! AH-GHEE! AH-GHEE!” Cries that seemed to come straight from his heart.

  23

  Silent Snow

  One night in December, as 1947 was drawing to a close, I was awakened by a profound silence, a total absence of sound of any kind. It was as if my bedroom had been smothered by a giant down-filled pillow. It was a silence that had weight. A silence that filled our small apartment as completely as water fills a fish tank.

  As we lived in a third-floor apartment in Brooklyn, there was always noise, night and day. During daylight hours, the sounds of children playing, and adults gossiping and arguing and complaining, drifted up to my open bedroom window. At night, the children safely in bed, the adults hit the street below my window to continue their gossiping and arguing and complaining in their distinctive Brooklyn voices. But not this night. As my brother slept on, unaware, I went to my window and saw the most remarkable sight: an impenetrable white wall of falling snow. Some twenty hours later it would be recorded as the greatest snowfall in the history of Brooklyn, exceeding even the legendary record-setting “Blizzard of 1888” by over five inches. (Like all records, my childhood “blizzard” would later be eclipsed. It would happen some fifty-nine years later, though only by half an inch.)

  In that deep silence, I heard my father muttering in his sleep. Looking into his room, I saw him tossing and turning in great agitation while locked in a dream that would not let him go. His hands were signing his dream.

  The next morning, all of us kept at home by the new-fallen snow, I asked him if he dreamed in sign.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I never thought to wonder.”

  “Do you think in sign?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure,” he answered. “All my thinking comes at once. Sometime I see a complete picture in my head.”

  Then he hesitated. “Wait. That’s not all true. Sometimes I think about a problem with sign pictures. Also, sometimes I talk out my thinking to myself with my hands. My language is in my hands. My memories are in my hands. All my thinking is in my hands.”

  Then my father’s hands told me a story:

  “When I was a young man in the Depression, I knew a deaf boy who worked in a dangerous factory. He had no choice. He had to bring his family some money to buy food to eat. There were many people in his family, and his father was dead, so the boy had to be the father.

  “The deaf boy worked six days a week, twelve hours a day. He got very tired. One day he was so tired, he paid no close attention to the machine he was working on, and the machine took off the fingers of his right hand. All the fingers. After his hand healed, the deaf boy lost his language. He could only talk with one hand. Deaf people did not clearly understand him. Very sad. Now I have nightmares of this bad thing happening to me.”

  My father stopped signing and stared at his hands with a look of terror on his face.

  “How would I talk if such a terrible thing happened to me?” he signed. “My language is in my hands. How would I tell of my love for my beautiful Sarah? And if I had no hands, how would I touch and hold my boys?”

  Then he looked out the window at the accumulated snow piled deeply in front of our apartment house. Nothing was moving on our block. Nothing was visible: no blacktop street, no sewers, no curb, no fire hydrant, no iron picket fence, no garbage cans, no stoop, no cars. But here and there in the vast whiteness were occasional humps in the snow blanket, shadowy shapes that suggested what lay beneath.

  “Come see what else my hands can do,” he signed, grabbing a snow shovel with one hand and my sled in the other. I took my brother’s hand, and our father marched us out of our apartment, down the stairs, and out into what seemed, to my brother and me, the North Pole.

  24

  Pigskin Dreams

  When I turned seven, my father bought me an authentic Wilson leather football. I could not hold it, as my hand was too small. My mother thought my father a bit premature and told him so. “He will grow,” he signed to her, his hidden closed right hand appearing ever so slowly from behind his open left covering hand. Rising upward, it grew, spreading wide, flushed with new life. I saw all this in his sign: the petals of a blooming plant unfolding as the stalk of his right arm rose ever higher, seeking the warmth of the sun. Then, so there was no doubt as to how big I’d be one day, he held his right hand palm down at his waist, and slowly raised it until it was over his head—and he smiled.

  Watching my father’s sign, I tried to imagine myself someday as strong as he was and even taller. That, I thought, could not be possible.

  I was more fascinated by my father’s signs than I was with the large clumsy object, now forgotten, that he had placed into my hands.

  My father wanted desperately for me to have the childhood he never had—the carefree joy of his brother and sisters at play, which he’d watched from afar.

  I grew. And as I grew, my father encouraged me to play the various street games of our block, the same games that were played on every block and in every neighborhood of Brooklyn.

  Unlike my friends’ fathers, who were usually too tired after a day’s work or too preoccupied with the lengthening reach of the Depression, my father was an avid and in time a knowledgeable observer of these street games. And he was my greatest fan. As my friends and I played, he would stand on the curb, which was the sideline of our football field and the third-base line of our stickball games. Our “playing field” was not covered in the soft green grass of a real football field but in black unyielding macadam, interrupted by the occasional cast-iron manhole cover. All in all, it was a most inhospitable surface upon which to slide or fall.

  And yet
I would fall, and I would slide. Each fall and slide was accompanied by my father’s deaf voice shouting encouragement. “Great catch!” “You’re safe!” Though my friends could make no sense of these harsh sounds, I understood them, and they were the unremarked-upon accompaniment to many of our games.

  One memorable day, while reaching for a winning touchdown pass, I ran into a parked car. My last conscious thought was that I had my man beat. I woke up in Coney Island Hospital. The first person I saw was my father sitting beside my bed. “You scored,” he signed. Then he added, “Now what the heck will we tell Mother?”

  On a late-summer day when I had just turned sixteen, I reported for football tryouts, which were held on our high school football field. The field, like our school, was new—so new that it lacked even a single blade of grass. I would shortly discover that it did not lack other objects, most noticeably stones. I would further observe that those stones, randomly seeded, were uniformly hard. But I figured this field could not be any harder than the macadam on which I had learned to play the game.

  The coach presiding over the tryouts was Harry Ostro, who had served with the 101st Airborne in World War II. Ostro had been a paratrooper in the largest airborne battle in history, Operation Market Garden, which was immortalized some thirty years later in the movie A Bridge Too Far. After successfully leading his platoon inside enemy lines, Ostro had been seriously wounded. But all I knew about him at the time, and only because it was all too visible, was that he had a metal plate in his head—something he never spoke about. The coach was, then and now, the toughest man I ever met. (He still pumps out fifty push-ups a day, having recently turned ninety-two.) The coach didn’t talk, he growled.

  I made the squad that day—not for my negligible skills, but for my ability to survive the grueling physical and mental demands he imposed on us—and spent the next three months in mortal fear. Like my teammates, I never feared the opposing team. It was our coach we feared.

  My father came to every game. Although I rode the bench, rarely seeing any action, he could not be dissuaded from coming. In rain or shine, sleet, and once in a driving early-season snowstorm, he was there. Sitting on the bench, my back turned to the stands, I couldn’t see my father, but I could hear his guttural voice as it cut through the shouts of the other spectators.

  High school was a new world for me. My fellow students had rarely if ever seen a deaf man before, and I had dreaded the prospect of watching them stiffen, as people almost invariably did, at the strange sound of my father’s voice. My teammates, however, soon grew accustomed to my father, just as my friends on the block had. And they came to appreciate him for being such a loyal fan of our team.

  Football was my passport to normalcy in high school. At that age especially, kids have a strong desire to fit in, to be like the others, to be part of the crowd, and as the child of deaf parents, I yearned more than most to hide behind a shield of normalcy. Because of football, I ceased to be known as the deaf man’s son; instead I was known as a football player.

  When my first season ended and I was awarded a football letter, my mother sewed it onto my varsity sweater. I wore that sweater until it was in tatters.

  The following year I grew two inches and added twenty pounds to my previously scrawny frame. I had matured enough for my coach to use me in games more frequently. At least, he reasoned, I wouldn’t be killed.

  My father came to every game, as usual. Now we would spend the evening after the contest analyzing the good and bad plays. My father caught on fast, becoming an astute student of football. But to describe the nuances of the game, we had to teach ourselves a whole new vocabulary of signs.

  The night before the final game of that season, unbeknownst to us, our star tailback fell down a flight of stairs and landed, right hand extended, on a broken milk bottle. The next afternoon he showed up for the game—at the field of our archrivals, New Utrecht High School—with his arm heavily bandaged. He could not suit up. The team was in a state of shock. Joe Darienzo was a senior. This was to be his last game. He was Brooklyn’s best tailback and the leader of our team. We all sat there in the locker room prior to the opening kickoff, dejected and with a sense of impending doom.

  The coach stood with his arm draped over Joe’s shoulder and addressed the team.

  “Men, this is the most important game of the season.”

  We knew that.

  “Joe wanted more than anything to play this game. But he can’t.”

  We knew that.

  “Joe is an important part of this team. But it is the team that wins or loses, not any single man.”

  We knew that.

  “As a team, we can win this game today.”

  We weren’t at all sure of that.

  Then he told us that I would start in Joe’s place.

  That I hadn’t known. Nor had the team or my father. But when my father saw me in the backfield behind the center on the very first play, he knew that this would be a memorable game. And he began to dream up new football signs, since we would have much to discuss that evening.

  How much, I had no idea as I stood in a daze waiting to receive the opening hike. Our center was looking back at me, upside down between his legs, with obvious skepticism on his face. His look did little to reassure me. The rest of the game passed in a blur. The only solid memory I have is being yelled at. The coach yelled at me. Joe, overcoat slung over his shoulder, his arm in a sling, ranging up and down the sidelines, yelled at me. My father, who had been given a sideline pass for the game, yelled at me, as he relentlessly recorded my every boneheaded mistake on his wind-up movie camera.

  Every pass I threw was a picture-perfect spiral…right into the hands of a waiting defensive receiver. Every run I made was stopped at the line of scrimmage. Every inept hand-off to another backfield man I attempted was fumbled.

  However, my teammates played an exemplary game, more than making up for my mistakes. In the final quarter we were tied. In the waning minutes our coach came up with a desperation play, an all-or-nothing shot at winning. It was based on the assumption that, given my pathetic performance all that long afternoon, nobody on the opposing team would be paying me much attention. As a threat, I was about as dangerous as our head cheerleader. So no one would wonder why the hike from center would go not to me, as was normal, but to our fullback, who was to my right. Exaggerating the fact that I was empty-handed, I veered to the left. (Being adept at sign language, I was an excellent mime and finally I had a role on this miserable afternoon that I could fill.) Meanwhile, the fullback made a big show of handing the ball off to Tommy La Spada, our shifty wingback, who was headed in the other direction. While this dumb show was playing itself out in the backfield, our linemen went into a choreographed ballet, feinting this way and that, confusing not only the opposing team but themselves as well.

  In the midst of all the hullabaloo, with studied nonchalance I drifted back to my right, and Tommy, coming from the other direction, handed the ball to me with such deft sleight-of-hand that the oncoming defensive end missed the move. One look at the fierce expression on his face, and Tommy realized that the end was setting himself up to crush him to the ground. Tommy, although tough as nails, was one of the smallest members of the team—and he was no fool. I heard him scream, “I don’t have the ball!” That was a clarion call for me to get out of there fast.

  Our cartoon play was so successful that no one now was watching me—and I ran for my life down the right sideline, unnoticed and untouched, and scored a touchdown. We had won the game, just as our coach had said. The crowd went wild. Through all the outpouring of sound, I could clearly make out my father’s harsh, whooping voice.

  That evening my father laughingly taught me the strangest signs I would ever learn in my lifetime.

  25

  Exodus

  My senior year in high school, I was offered a football scholarship to Brandeis University, a brand-new school in New England that had sophomore, junior, and senior classes but needed a fr
eshman class. It also needed football players who would be willing to take the chance of going to a school that wouldn’t even be eligible for accreditation for another two years.

  I had also been offered a football scholarship to NYU—but their campus was in the Bronx, and if I accepted that offer, it would mean continuing to live at home and commuting to school by subway. I never considered it for a moment.

  My father was ecstatic. I would be the first on either side of my family to go to college.

  “You must look like a college man,” he signed. “I don’t want them to think you’re a yokel from the sticks.” Brooklyn? The sticks? I didn’t argue. My going to college was going to be as exciting an experience for him as it would be for me. And I wouldn’t deny him the pleasure of dressing me up like a college man. Our once-a-year trips to Mr. Bloomingdale and Mr. R. and H. Macy became an almost weekly ritual the summer after my senior year in high school. Clutching photographs of college men torn out of magazines in his hand, my father scoured the racks of suits to find those that would make me look the part, and—perhaps more important—would last for four years.

  One day in early August my father accompanied me, newly bought suitcase in hand, to Grand Central Station, where I would catch the train to Boston. I was dressed in a heavy wool tweed suit. It was about ninety degrees in the station. I did not sign one word of complaint. As the conductor shouted “All aboard!” my father looked me over one last time and signed, “You look like a college man for sure.” Then he added, “I’ll see you soon.” Little did I know how true that would be. For the next four years my father came to almost every home game we played, always carrying a heavy CARE package that my mother had lovingly prepared all that week.