Hands of My Father: A Hearing Boy, His Deaf Parents, and the Language of Love (30 page)

This simple street game, requiring no bat, glove, ball, or any other special equipment, operated on the principle of tension and release—tension at being singled out as It, and the anticipated release of transferring that role to someone else. The appeal resided in the fact that there always
was
someone else.

As a child playing with my friends on my Brooklyn block, I loved this game. When my turn came, I didn’t mind at all the brief period during which I played the role of It.

But as the same child living upstairs in apartment 3A, I deeply resented that I was always and eternally It. My father’s use of me in certain situations was akin to his use of a tool selected with care from his carpenter’s toolbox. In 3A there would never be anyone else I could transfer that role to by the simple expedient of a tag.

22

Dad, Jackie, and Me

I
t was the golden summer of 1947. Now that I had turned fourteen, my father gave me a belated birthday present, one that I had dreamed about but never thought I would see. Coming home from work one night, a triumphant expression on his face, he held up two baseball tickets.

Sign was unnecessary.

My father had never played sports as a boy and, with the exception of boxing, didn’t seem to have much interest as an adult. But he had loved the Brooklyn Dodgers ever since they signed Jackie Robinson earlier that year. Jackie Robinson was a black man and a great athlete. It was a new world now, and a black man was playing first base for our home team. Who would have thought it possible?

My father put down the paper and handed me the precious pair of thick cardboard tickets that announced in black bold letters, “Brooklyn Dodgers vs. St. Louis Cardinals.” We fans in Brooklyn hated the Cards with such enduring passion, the words might as well have been “Brooklyn Goes to War.”

My father took up a batter’s stance and wagged an invisible bat menacingly over his shoulder, his eyes squinting, the better to see the arrival over the plate of an invisible spinning baseball that he appeared to be completely capable of smashing out of the park.

I was puzzled. I simply could not fathom my father’s sudden interest in Jackie Robinson. I knew my father’s history well, as he enjoyed telling me stories of when he was a boy my age. As a deaf boy in a deaf residential military academy at the turn of the last century, he had had few opportunities for play of any kind, including sports. First he had had to learn discipline, for in those days deaf children were thought by their hearing teachers to be ungovernable animals. Then he had to be taught the basics of reading and writing—an arduous process for the teachers, and a grueling one for the pupils. Play was a luxury available only to the hearing kids, the teachers at his school said. The deaf would have to spend every minute of their young lives trying to keep up, since they would always be behind—deaf in a hearing world.

Baffled as I was by my father’s sudden desire to go to a baseball game, I certainly didn’t let it get in the way of my own excitement. I had never been to Ebbets Field and had never seen the Dodgers play. This was going to be a great event in my life.

I was an overnight sensation on my block when I showed my friends—but did not allow them to touch—the two baseball tickets. I slept with those two tickets under my pillow every night and never let them out of my sight during daylight hours.

Finally the big day arrived. I will never forget the look of the entrance to Ebbets Field, the elegant curve of the rotunda that drew us into that hallowed place. Once we passed through the clacking wooden turnstile, clutching our ticket stubs for dear life, we ascended with the excited mob up the dimly lit stone ramp beneath the towering concrete ceiling, out a small doorway, and into an arena overlooking a field of impossibly green grass. Down below us the grassy expanse was bisected by perfectly groomed brown base paths, bordered by strictly drawn powdered white lines stretching into infinity, all of it sparkling like a polished diamond in soft summer sunlight.

So
this
is what it looks like in real life, I thought.

Like every other kid in Brooklyn, I listened on the radio to Red Barber announce every single Dodger game of the season. Indeed, you could not walk down my block without hearing the Old Redhead calling out “balls” and “strikes” from every open window. I now realized that the images I had conjured up in my mind’s eye from listening to the radio were little more than black and white silhouettes, while
this
magnificent sight was in living Technicolor.

Our seats were perfect, box seats right on the first-base line, not fifty feet from Jackie Robinson. Jackie made his presence known soon after the umpire called, “Play ball!” He smacked a double off the left-field wall, sending the runner home for the first run of the day.

The game quickly turned into a pitching duel. But late in the game the Cards tied the score. Inning after inning, play after play, my father showered me with questions. With one eye on the action and the other on my father, I tried my best to describe, in abbreviated signs, the finer points of the game. Up until that time I had never actually seen a professional baseball game, but having listened to Red Barber I felt I was an expert.

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

O
ne 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.