Hands of My Father: A Hearing Boy, His Deaf Parents, and the Language of Love (20 page)

“Chubby was strong, and he loved the snow. In the winter he would grasp the collar of my little brother’s coat in his mouth and would pull him on the seat of his pants through the snow, and over the ice, up and down our block.

“Chubby and I had our own language. We understood each other perfectly. He understood me when I spoke a command. And not once did he wince or turn away at the sound of my voice. I had merely to whisper his name from another room, and he would come bounding down the hallway to my side. And I taught him signs. Chubby learned sign, whereas my parents and brothers and sister never did. I began to think Chubby was a lot smarter than all of them.

“Now my weekends at home went by in a blur of orange fur, and I wasn’t lonely for one second of the time. It was hard to say goodbye to Chubby every Monday morning, when my father took me back to my school. But he was always there, anticipating my arrival, every Friday night when I returned.”

I did not recall my mother ever looking as happy as she did when she recounted what she remembered of her dog from so long ago, her childhood friend.

“But one day I lost Chubby forever. He had been jumping on a neighbor’s boy, who had been teasing him. When I went to pull him off, he bit me. I know he didn’t know it was me. He was just reacting like any dog would—he was protecting himself. But his bite was deep, and I was rushed to Coney Island Hospital, where the wound on my hand was stitched closed.

“When my father brought me home from the hospital, Chubby was waiting for me by the door as usual. He looked sad. I forgave him.

“The next weekend Chubby was gone. I found out later that my father had sold him to the iceman for five dollars. I never had a dog again.”

Suddenly I didn’t want a dog anymore. I had a hundred friends. I was never lonely. I had too much to do to take care of a silly old dog.

“What’s to eat?” I asked my mother. “I’m hungry.”

This, of course, was music that even my mother’s deaf ears could hear.

There was no talk of a dog ever again.

13

My Father’s Language

T
here is a wall in my home that displays a score of old family photos. But no physical photograph is as sharp as the mental picture I have of my father. In memory I see my father with his surprisingly small, slender nose, thick black hair parted just off the precise middle of his head with razor sharpness, and eyes like a pair of dark reflecting pools framed by questioning eyebrows, through which he saw a world that he struggled, often with limited success, to decode. His mouth is small and empty. It contains no language. His lips are thin. They shape no words. My father’s language is in his hands.

My father’s hands were strong. His language was strong. He did not try to become invisible by making small signs in public. His signs were not furtive, fearful, timid, or apologetic. On the silvered screen of memory the snapshot images are transformed into a movie, and signs are flung powerfully from his hands like wild birds taking flight. And like the beating of a wild bird’s wings, my father’s hands would not be contained. “Look at me, world,” they pronounced. “I’m a deaf man. I’m proud. Hearing people can go to hell, I don’t care.”

When he was angry, his signs were angry. His face expressed anger. And anger flowed from his body until you could feel its heat. My father’s anger was mainly directed at the hearing world. Although he had long since accepted the unthinking hostility that hearing people directed at him on a daily basis—they were ignorant of deaf ways, he reasoned—what did set him off was their indifference. They seemed to ignore him, as if he, a deaf man, were simply invisible to them.

When my father was happy, his signs were light and fanciful, and they soared. His happiness registered in his face, and his entire body expanded in joy.

Above all things, his family brought him happiness. His signs embraced us.

One night as we were sitting at the kitchen table after dinner, my father told my brother and me:

“Hearing people talk only with the mouth. Hearing words tumble from the mouth, one word after another word, like a long word train. The meaning is not clear until the caboose word comes out of the mouth tunnel. These are only dry words, like dead insects. Mouth-talk is like a painting with no color. You can see shape. Understand an idea. But it’s flat, like a black and white picture. There is no life in a black and white picture.

“My language is not a black and white language. The language of my hands and face and body is a Technicolor language. When I am angry, my language is red-hot like the sun. When I am happy, my language is blue like the ocean, and green like a meadow, and yellow like pretty flowers.

“My language is God’s language. He put His language in my hands for all my time on earth. In heaven I will have no need for sign. I will talk directly to God.”

My father had made himself a student of how spoken language compares to sign language. Now he decided it was time to give my brother and me a demonstration of the difference between the two.

“Now you mouth-talk,” he signed. “Say
drum.
”

He watched my mouth carefully as I said, “Drum.”

“Say
thunder.
”

He put his open palm in front of my mouth as I said, “Thunder.”

“Say
crash.
”

I said, “Crash.”

“I cannot see a loud sound when you say these hearing mouth-words,” my father signed. “And I do not feel a loud sound coming from your mouth.”

“Yes,” I answered him. “To make my words explain how loud a drum sounds, or how loud the thunder is, or how loud the crash is, I have to use other words, words that describe the original word. Adjectives.”

“I know hearing adjective words,” he answered with derision.

“Adjectives are decoration words, like silver tinsel on a green Christmas tree. They are not real words with their own meaning. A beautiful green tree needs no decoration. Such a tree is most beautiful in the ground and not in a living room with its beauty covered up with tinsel, lights, and hanging balls. Your mouth-talk is a weak thing. It needs many more words to explain the original word.”

He thought a minute. “Watch me now talk with my hands.”

My father signed
drum.
His hands held invisible drumsticks, and he slowly began to beat an invisible drum. Softly.

My brother and I sat mesmerized at the sight of our father’s closed hands rising and falling.

Then his hands moved faster, more forcefully, and I saw the ends of the drumsticks striking the skin of the drumhead and began to “hear” his hands, while Irwin laughed with glee.

Suddenly a look of intense concentration spread across my father’s face, and his shoulders and body bent into the beating of his hands as they banged away with the now-visible drumsticks on the now-visible drum. I listened to the sound of his face and body and hands, all indivisible, and the sound was deafening. I covered my ears, and my brother followed my lead and covered his as well.

My father stopped banging. His hands were empty. The drumsticks had disappeared. The drum had disappeared. The sound had disappeared.

“My language is a picture language,” he signed, breathing heavily. “There is no need to explain.”

His point made, my father smiled and picked up the newspaper that he had brought home from work that day.

“Come watch,” my father said. “Now I make magic. I will make for you and Irwin four-cornered newspaper hats. Hats like my pals and me wear in the newspaper plant to keep the ink mist off our heads.”

As my mother dried the last of the dishes, my father carefully spread the paper out on the kitchen table. Selecting a perfect section, one that had been mechanically folded exactly down the center, his hands began to create magic. Folding the double-spread first this way and that, while scoring the edges with his strong nails, he tucked and folded the sheet of newsprint until, out of all the folds and creases, the shape of a hat emerged.

Tucking the final folds into place, he opened the shaped newsprint, and suddenly, before my eyes, he held a three-dimensional newspaper hat where but moments earlier there had been a one-dimensional sheet of paper. He gently placed it on my head. Somehow, miraculously, the hat was—as it always was—a perfect fit.

“You’re a printer now. Like me. No ink will get in your hair to make your pillow dirty and make Mother Sarah angry.”

He then repeated the process and placed a small newspaper hat on my brother’s head. We wore our newspaper hats to bed.

I often dreamed I was a printer, standing on the printing press floor alongside my father. He wore a newspaper hat. There was no ink in his hair.

 
Memorabilia
 

The Palmer Method

I
came home from school one day, my notebook filled with lines of gorgeous letters all in a row, bounding across the page like a herd of prancing gazelles. Sandwiched between these lines of soaring grace were leaden lines of crawling caterpillars.

This had been my first exposure to the dreaded Palmer Method of penmanship, which the school authorities of Brooklyn, in their wisdom, had determined was essential to the education of every budding street scholar. In my particular case, it was deemed critical. “Myron, what on earth are these words?” my teacher had said, at her wit’s end. “This page looks like the yard of a chicken run. What could these chicken tracks possibly mean?” I tried to explain, but in truth, some of the words were indecipherable even to me; this was impressive, as I had written them just a moment before.

As I listened to my traitorous classmates laughing, I watched in awe as my teacher proceeded to fill my notebook with lines of graceful, elegant letters—in alternating capitals and lower case.

“Now, Myron, take your notebook home and
practice
!”

That evening, after my mother had cleared the supper dishes from the kitchen table, I practiced my penmanship. In the blank lines between my teacher’s beautiful gazelle-like words, I scrawled my ugly, clumsy counterparts, as my father sat across from me, reading his paper.

Setting the newspaper aside, my father turned my notebook around so that he could look at what I had written.

“What in heaven’s name are you doing?” he signed. The look on his face was one of pure puzzlement.