Hands of My Father: A Hearing Boy, His Deaf Parents, and the Language of Love (5 page)

“This went on for a whole
year
?” I asked.

“Yes. They thought your hearing might go away. Just as hearing for me and Mother Sarah went away when we were young. Big mystery.”

“How about our neighbors? All that banging and stomping, didn’t they mind?” I asked.

“What do you expect?” my father answered. “We had to know if your hearing stayed with you. The neighbors threatened to call the landlord. Have us evicted. Mother Sarah sweet-talked them out of it. The notes flew fast and furious between them till they settled down. Anyway, they thought you were a cute baby. They also wondered if you could hear. They wondered if the deaf can have a hearing baby. We were the only deaf people they knew. They had no idea of our deaf ways.”

Thinking for a minute, his hands added, striking each other sharply, “It was
hard
for Mother Sarah and me to figure out how to take care of you. But we did. We learned how to tell when you cried at night. You slept in your crib next to our bed when we brought you home from the hospital. We kept a small light on all night. Mother Sarah wore a ribbon attached to her wrist and to your sweet baby foot. When you moved your foot, she would immediately awaken to see the reason why. She still has that ribbon somewhere. Sign was your first language. The first sign you learned was
I love you.

“That is a good sign. The best sign.”

 
Memorabilia
 

A Fox in Brooklyn

M
emory unwinds, like the steel spring of a windup clock.

I see myself as a small child, still so young that I am sleeping in my parents’ bedroom. I’m dressed in feet-pajamas that sport a practical drop-down seat flap. It is night. Something wakes me. So I go to wake my father. My hand on his shoulder was my first form of communication: touch. Soon after touch came sign, another language of hands.

“What?”
He jerks upright at the insistent shaking of his shoulder, simultaneously signing to me: his upturned hands wiggle imploringly, back and forth, demanding an answer. His face is a mask of puzzlement and inquiry. His shoulders hunch up in expectation of an answer.
What?
his long-drawn-out sign demands. Since he is deaf, and I can hear, he cannot permit any misunderstanding between us.

What?
was one of the earliest signs I remember acquiring. Almost every exchange between my deaf father and me began with the sign for
What?
My answer would decode many things for him. My needs. My feelings. My emotions. My state of mind. My request for information.

Virtually all communication between us took off from my response to that question:
What?
With this essential foundational exchange accomplished, he was able to proceed appropriately.

On this night, at midnight, the “what” was my fear.

“I heard a noise,” I signed, pointing to my ear and banging my small fists together. Since I was scared of the noise, my fists beat a strong tattoo against each other. My father stilled my hands and got out of bed.

“Show me,” he signed.

I think back on that exchange between my father and me so very long ago and realize that it must have been the first time I realized my father was deaf.

How could I
show
him the sound?

I took his hand in mine and pointed it to the closet. That’s where the sound was coming from.

As I clung to his leg, he opened the closet door. There, from the darkness, staring down at me, was the furry face of a fox, its bright unblinking eyes looking straight into mine, its small pointy ears taking in the sound of my choked, whimpering sobs. I looked back through half-closed wet eyelids, squinting in reflexive fear, as I saw the fox hunching his shoulders, preparing to spring at me. His gaping narrow mouth was filled with hundreds of small white pointy teeth. I could feel those teeth shredding my arm.

I screamed for my mother, but my mother slept on, her back turned to the sight of her only child about to be eaten alive.
Doesn’t she care?
My young mind could not process the fact that she could not hear the fox’s snarling, hungry anticipation of biting down on her son’s soft fleshy arm.

With his hands my father grabbed the fox by the neck and yanked him from his perch. Shaking the fox back and forth, he squeezed the life out of him. Now the eyes of the fox turned glassy, all life drained away. The fox hung limply, tail down, lifeless, in my father’s strong hands. Hands that gently held me, stroked my head, hugged me, and spoke to me. “Don’t be afraid. The fox won’t bother you anymore.”

Throwing the dead fox on the floor of the closet, he slammed the door on my nightmare, wiped the tears from my eyes, and led me back to my bed. As he tucked me tightly under my quilt, he looked at me for the longest time, a half-smile on his lips. Then, holding my face in his hands, he softly kissed me. And I went to sleep.

My mother and her fox stole

This recollection was for a long time a sharp pebble on the far shore of memory. From time to time, as I walked the beach of my childhood memories, I would step, barefooted, on that particular pebble. What exactly was that fearsome creature lurking in the closet that so infected my dreams? Surely there were no wild foxes running around in Brooklyn. At least not on my block; not in my apartment; and certainly not in my parents’ closet.

Many years later I realized that the monster my father killed for me that night must have been my mother’s fox-fur stole.

2

The Child as Father of the Man

M
y second language was spoken English.

I have no memory of learning this language, or at what age, but somehow I did. And with the acquisition of spoken language, a big part of my childhood ended before it began. As the hearing child of a deaf father, I was expected to perform the daily alchemy of transmuting the silent visual movements of my father’s hands into the sound of speech and meaning for the hearing, and then to perform the magic all over again for him, in reverse, transmuting invisible sound into visible sign.

Many years later, as a student in college, I came across this line from Wordsworth: “The child is father of the man.” I immediately understood its meaning—even if it wasn’t what Wordsworth himself had intended.

At times while acting as my father’s human conduit between sign and sound, I felt not unlike the telephone wires strung from pole to pole down the backyards of our Brooklyn neighborhood: wires through which compressed sound was somehow magically converted and transported, to emerge at the other end as comprehensible speech. As a deaf family, we had no telephone. I was our human telephone, lacking only a dial tone, but like a telephone I was available for instant use at all hours of the day or night, completely at the whim and needs of its owner, my deaf father.

In addition to playing this role, I also found myself increasingly called upon to explain sound to my father, as if sound were a tangible thing that, although invisible, if explained properly, comprehensively, even exhaustively by me, could be imagined by my deaf father and thus, with understanding, made real for him.

For as long as I can remember, I always had a radio. Just as I cannot disassociate memories of my existence in my crib from the discordant sound of banging pots and pans, so too there was always music, and the music of speech. My father had decided shortly after bringing me home from the hospital that sound was something that I would
learn
to hear, and having learned it, I would not lose this ability through disuse. He was convinced, since there was no one to tell him otherwise, that one acquired and maintained the ability to hear by practice. The Philco radio he bought to ensure my constant exposure to sound sat on a small stand by the head of my bed, just beyond the wooden slats of my crib. It was turned on day and night. The yellow light that illuminated the dial was my nightlight. And I was quite comforted both by the warm yellow light and by the sound pouring unceasingly from that wood-and-cloth box. The light and the sound accompanied me to sleep every night.

When I was older and left my crib for a bed with no sides, alongside my new grown-up bed in my very own room was a new grown-up radio. I had graduated from a table-model radio, standing on four little feet, to a solid piece of heavy dark wooden furniture that sat gravely on my bedroom floor. It was taller than me and looked not unlike a cathedral, with an arched dome and a tracery face, like the quatrefoil rose window of Chartres Cathedral, but filled with cloth insets instead of bits of stained glass. Its chunky knobs completely filled my childish hands.