Hands of My Father: A Hearing Boy, His Deaf Parents, and the Language of Love (7 page)

The line of restless shoppers now stood as statues, frozen in their places, staring with blank, unfeeling eyes.

“What did the man say?” my father asked me.

Above all else my father had taught me that I must never,
ever
edit what hearing people directed at him, no matter what they said. He wanted it straight. Thus I signed, “
The man says you’re a dummy,
” while a roaring furnace burned within my six-year-old body, almost blistering my skin.

I had never heard anyone call my father a dummy before. The only time I had ever heard the word was on the radio during the Charlie McCarthy show, when Edgar Bergen called Charlie a dummy. “Charlie, you’re a dummy. You’re nothing but a block of wood.”

My father was not a block of wood. He was no dummy.

My father’s face flushed with anger.

“
Tell the man to shove the roast up his ass!
” he signed with exaggerated emphasis.

“My father says we’ll be back, thank you.”

Outside on the street my father knelt down to me.

“I know you didn’t tell the butcher man what I told you,” he signed. “I could tell by looking at his face. That’s okay. I understand. You were embarrassed.

“It’s not fair, I know.

“I’m in the deaf world.

“You’re in the hearing world.

“I need you to help me in your world. He a ring people have no time for a deaf man. No time to read my notes. They have no patience for the deaf. Hearing people think I’m stupid.
I am not stupid.
”

My father’s hands fell silent.

“No matter what they think,” he finally signed to me, “I must still deal with them. So I must ask you for help. You can hear. You can speak.”

My father was always so sure of himself. But now he seemed different. And I thought he might cry. I had never seen my father cry. I couldn’t even imagine it. And it scared me.

Looking directly into my eyes, he slowly signed, “It hurts me to have this need for you. You’re just a boy. I hope you will understand and not hate me.”

Hate my father? I was shocked. How could he think that?

“No.” I shook my head.

“Never!” my hand said.

My father took me in his arms and kissed me, then held my head to his chest, and I heard his beating heart.

N
ot long after the butcher shop incident, my grandmother Celia told me, “You must always take care of your parents!” That’s all she said. She didn’t explain herself, or give me any instructions about how to follow her advice. However, I vividly remember what she told me that day because it was so baffling to me. How could I, a child, take care of them, adults? And not just any adults—they were my mother and father. But I would learn.

 
Memorabilia
 

The Language of Touch

F
rom the time I was a small child, I was struck by how often my father would hold me, for no reason that I could ever understand. On my block it was quite noticeable, even to a young kid like me. In that time men had the socially accepted role of breadwinner. They were not the nurturers of our young lives. That role was reserved for our mothers.

Every weekday morning while it was still dark, the apartment houses on our block would empty of all our fathers. The men would march with heavy-lidded eyes, virtually in lockstep, to the subway station on Kings Highway, from which the subway trains would whisk them off to points all over Brooklyn, as well as to “the city.” (No Brooklynite
ever
called the
city
“Manhattan.”) There our fathers toiled in largely meaningless tasks, uncomplainingly, since the Depression was not far from memory. Latter-day concepts of having a “career” or work that was “fulfilling” would have been Greek to their ears. A “job” plain and simple, the ability to earn that which was sufficient to “put bread on the table” and pay the rent—that’s what our fathers’ daily tasks in those days were all about.

My father and I

At precisely one hour before supper, the fathers of our block would return, shoulders turned downward, heads bent, the
New York Daily News
held tightly under their arms.

The women would proceed to greet their husbands, often launching into a well-documented list of
their
child’s misbehavior that very day. This litany of misdeeds might result in a swat on the head to the errant child with the folded
Daily News
—or worse.

On my block, in those long-ago days, this was often the only physical connection a father would make with his son.

But that was not the case with my father. At the end of his workday he would drop to his knees when he saw me, and hold me close, as if I had been lost, then found. After that first embrace he would hold me at arm’s length, looking me over long and deeply. On his face I would detect a look of mild surprise, a look I could never decipher. No signs were exchanged between us. All that I needed, in order to understand how much my father loved me, was the feel of his arms around me. He spoke, and the language I heard was the language of his touch.

3

The Fights

M
y interpreting for my father was an external business. It occurred on the outside, in the hearing world. One day, though, I was called upon to perform my trick inside the walls of our apartment, and this time I was put to a test beyond my calendar years, and many light-years beyond my skills.

It was a June night in 1938, and the occasion was a rematch between Joe Louis, the black man known as America’s Brown Bomber, and Max Schmeling, Adolf Hitler’s example of presumed Nazi racial superiority, a product of the Master Race. In their first fight Schmeling had knocked out Louis. The Fuehrer had crowed like the cock of the world’s walk. Now it was time for the Brown Bomber to redeem himself and expose Hitler’s lie of racial superiority.

My father came home from work that night excitedly waving the
New York Daily News
in my face. “You tell me all about the big fight!” he signed, his fists punching the air. “Joe Louis is fighting Max Schmeling. Joe has
my
name.” He pointed to his chest. “Louis,” he finger-spelled proudly.

My father was so excited about the fight that he rushed us through the dinner my mother had spent hours preparing. Normally my father was always after me to eat more slowly, to chew each mouthful of food at least three times before swallowing—five times if it was calf’s liver, which was exceedingly tough (and a dish I thoroughly detested). That night, however, after gulping his own food rather than chewing it, my father pushed his chair away from the table and signed to me, “
Let’s go!
”

Twirling the dial, I soon tuned in to the broadcast of the fight. We were early. The prefight commentary by the announcer detailed the career of Joe Louis; that of Schmeling; the replay of their last fight; and the political significance of this rematch. The complexity of all this information surpassed by far both my understanding of current events and my signing sophistication. My father didn’t care. All he was interested in was the fight itself.

Through the cloth speaker of my radio, I heard the bell ring. The crowd roared like a herd of wild beasts, the sound loud enough to wake the dead. My father just sat there, cocooned in serene silence, eyes locked on my hands, my face, and the radio, waiting for my hands to transform the invisible, unheard sound into the visible, understood sign.

The fight was on. The noise of the crowd, and the screaming voice of the announcer, poured in a torrent from my radio.

I struggled to sign what was happening, what I was hearing; struggled to keep up. But there were just too many raw sounds coming at me, all crowded together. Besides which, my signing vocabulary did not include signs for the boxing game. Oh, sure, I could sign
chicken.
That was easy, as the sign looked like a chicken. I could sign
corn.
(I was great with vegetables, as my father had taught me a garden of signs, a veritable farm full of signs.) But how to sign,
The Brown Bomber lands with an uppercut. Now he’s jabbing Schmeling. Jab, jab, jab. There’s no letup. Schmeling’s eye is closing. Jab, jab, another jab to the eye. Joe Louis is killing him. Another uppercut. One to the breadbasket. Schmeling doubles over. OOOHH, that one will bring up his lunch.