As I watched my mother, still deeply asleep, signing into the air, I was sure her indecipherable signs were meant for my father. I like to think that she was telling him with her hands, in their private language, that he would not have much longer to wait.
When we knew my mother had but a week to live, my brother flew out from New York to beat her side. During the week of her dying, my brother and I spent some time talking to each other about our shared experiences as hearing children born to two deaf parents. This was the first time we had ever done so. We spoke often, and late, about our experiences being raised by the people our neighbors at that time called “the deafies in apartment 3A.”
Our mother has been dead now for several years, and our father more than thirty, and yet my brother and I still cannot agree on how that shared experience—growing up in apartment 3A with our deaf father and mother, so many years ago—has affected our lives down to this day. We no longer argue about our different impressions of what being deaf meant to them, or about how their being deaf has impacted us; at our age we finally realize that we will never agree.
There is one thing, however, that we do agree on: how much we both loved them, and how terribly we miss them.
I scattered my mother’s ashes in the four places I thought she’d like to be remembered, the four compass points of her life.
On a bitterly cold and unseasonably snowy day in early April, I carefully spread some of her ashes, strangely warm and heavy in my hands, in a wide circle over the sands of Coney Island, approximating the circle that the deaf had made in their beach chairs almost eighty years before, when my mother was a beautiful young woman, displaying her perfect young body in a tight-fitting wool bathing suit, her life stretching out into a seemingly distant future. I imagined the depressions in the sand that were made by her small feet. As the wind swirled about me, I watched her bone-white ashes blow off, mingling with the pure white falling snow, to be absorbed forever into the waiting empty sands.
Then I waded into the surf; my legs burned with the shock of the cold water and immediately went numb. As I stood knee-deep in the icy waves that died on the shore and then ebbed away, I released a few more grains of my mother’s ashes. They floated off, drawn deeply into the vast ocean, toward Ireland, the same ocean that eighty summers ago she had swum so tirelessly, leaving us behind in the early morning, not returning until the afternoon. I stood on the cold shore remembering how as a boy I would wait at the edge of this ocean until catching sight of her white rubber-capped head bobbing above the waves, her slim nut-brown arms languidly stroking the water, and her strong shoulders sparkling with diamonds of sunlight, as she came straight toward me. Thrashing through the surf, long legs striding against the outgoing tide, she would swoop me up in her arms. I would cling to her, all warm from the sun, my head nuzzling her wet neck, breathing the ends of her cropped matted hair smelling of the deepest ocean.
Later that same day, as the snow continued to fall, I buried some more of my mother’s ashes in a small hole I had dug in the ivy-covered mound humped over my father’s grave in a cramped Brooklyn cemetery filled with leaning snow-topped headstones. In the profound silence of the empty cemetery, the snow quickly covered the small grave that her ashes rested in, over the larger mound of my father’s casket. As I watched, kneeling, head bowed, the snow fell silently, covering everything with its soft blanket.
Back in California, I spread some more of my mother’s ashes on the naked stone lip of San Jacinto Mountain, towering ten thousand feet over Palm Springs, where she had lived with me, with occasional pleasure and much resignation, the last six years of her life. In those final years, when our respective roles had been completely reversed, I now the parent, she the child, I came to know my mother, and through her, my childhood, as I never had before. And I recalled the lines of T. S. Eliot: “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”
Finally, in Santa Monica, where my wife and I also have a home (and my mother often visited before she became ill), I spread my mother’s ashes in an imaginary line beginning at the base of a solitary cluster of palm trees leaning into each other, which seemed to me to resemble my tight-knit, insular family. The thin trail of ashes continued across the sands of a California beach and ended in the ocean, where I submerged myself in the tumbling surf, letting the sea reclaim from my cupped hand the last few grains.
Now, from the bluff at the foot of my street, a hundred feet above the bustling daily traffic on the Pacific Coast Highway, where no doubt the drivers think of the Dow and not of death, I have an unbroken line of sight over the indwelling palm trees, across the corrugated sand, and into the timeless ocean. From the shoreline, my gaze travels on the broad blue back of the ocean to the blue-gray horizon that bleeds into the gray-blue sky.
Epilogue
There are times, when the house is sleeping, when I remember the smell of my father’s body. It is a mixture of many odors, a brisk hint of Old Spice blended with his mug shaving soap, Vitalis, and the sharp odor of the Lava soap he used every night with a stiff brush to clean off the printer’s grime that had accumulated under his nails and in the creases of his strong hands.
As a boy, I would sit on the closed toilet seat and watch in fascination as my father scoured his hands until they were pink and fresh.
“My voice is in my hands,” he said. “Dirty hands do not speak clearly and with beauty. My hands must be clean, must always be clean.”
My father would carefully dry his hands, one strong finger at a time, and then would look down at me with a soft look in his eyes. And his eloquent hands would come to life shaping the air with his perfect love for me.
While I remember, my hands awaken and, independent of me, begin to talk to my father. And as the mists of memory part, I clearly see the hands of my father signing back to me.
Many years after the death of my father, when I had the passing thought that I could be an artist, I was studying a book on how to draw the human figure. In the introduction the author extolled the human form as a thing of beauty and infinite complexity, celebrated throughout history by poets and lovers, analyzed and dissected by doctors and architects.
The book then proceeded apace, from a study of The Eyes, The Ears, The Nose, The Mouth, and from there downward.
Eventually, I turned a page, and there was: The Hands.
Displayed on the following pages were marvelous, deceptively simple, pencil line drawings of the human hand in motion.
The accompanying description of the topic began with the sentence “Hands speak a rich language.”
Unbidden, my eyes filmed over, and I put down my pencil, and cried.
About the Author
MYRON UHLBERG is the critically acclaimed and award-winning author of a number of children’s books. He lives with his wife in Santa Monica and Palm Springs, California.
Also by Myron Uhlberg
For Children
FLYING OVER BROOKLYN
MAD DOG MCGRAW
LEMUEL THE FOOL
THE PRINTER
DAD, JACKIE, AND ME
HANDS OF MY FATHER
A Bantam Book / February 2009
Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2008 by Myron Uhlberg
Bantam Books is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Uhlberg, Myron.
Hands of my father: a hearing boy, his deaf parents, and the language of love / Myron Uhlberg.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-553-90627-1
1. Uhlberg, Myron. 2. Children of deaf parents—United States—Biography. 3. Deaf parents—United States—Biography. 4. Deaf—Family relationships—United States—Case studies. I. T
itle.
HQ759.912U45 2009
306.874092—dc22
[B] 2008025628
www.bantamdell.com
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