Train Go Sorry

by Leah Hager Cohen

  9

  Salvaging

  The first thing my grandmother lost was her name—Bessie. When she was five and became so ill, her family took the name away in order to fool the evil spirits. It worked; the spirits rode off in the empty shell of Bessie and left the real human girl to live. But they stole her hearing, and left in its place a fat white scar where the infection had been. The scar roped from behind one ear to the base of her throat. The spirits also snatched her hair; she had to wear a bonnet until it grew back. By that time she was called Fannie.

  Fannie was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1914, the youngest of seven children. Five of her siblings—Hymie, Ida, Yetta, Izzy, and Loretta—were born in Bukovina, a region in Eastern Europe that spread across the north of Romania into the Ukraine, not far from Kiev, where my grandfather was born. In 1912 Benzion and Pearl Hager brought their family to the land of opportunity. Here in America their last two children, Arthur and Fannie, were born. All of them were hearing except Fannie, after her illness, and Izzy, six years her senior, who was born deaf.

  Their father was a fur trader and a philanderer, both of which occupations took him on frequent voyages overseas. When he was home, Fannie remembers, he was stingy and chain-smoking. Even on the Sabbath, Benzion would go to the toilet and roll his own; presently smoke would curl from the crack beneath the door. He was a distant man, with one black boot firmly planted in Europe; his beard, as thick as the forest, smelling of sulfur and blue ash.

  In photographs, Fannie’s mother, Pearl Orringer Hager, is handsome and sad, with wide nostrils and wide dark eyes, long brows riding above them like wings. She spent much of the time in a sanatorium with a mysterious ailment. On rare visits home, she would kneel on the kitchen floor and rock herself, bashing her head against the wall. There were no words, no explanations for Fannie, just a sad mother coming through the door and going out again.

  One day, when she was eleven, Fannie came home to find the family gathered around her mother. Pearl lay in a wooden box in the center of the living room. Fannie followed the others as they shuffled slowly around the box. She wasn’t sure, but she felt her mother must be resting. Later she was told that her mother had died. The other children overheard whispers that Pearl had plunged out of an eighth-story window at the sanatorium, but the only story ever to reach Fannie was that her mother had expired of a nervous breakdown.

  Benzion remarried a year after Pearl’s death, and twice more after that. He divorced two wives and buried two before dying himself at the age of eighty-nine. Fannie did not grow up with her father, who moved to the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. She attended P.S. 47, the school for the deaf in Manhattan, and at night slept on cots at her sisters’ apartments in the Bronx, shuttling between Yetta’s, where she stayed in the same room as her baby nephew, and Ida’s, where she slept in the foyer.

  In this way, by the time she was twelve years old, Fannie had lost her name, her hearing, her mother, and her father.

  Shortly after her husband’s death, my grandmother moved to Hallendale, Florida. For the past ten years she has lived alone in one of a row of biscuit-colored buildings that she calls, with her slightly skewed pronunciation, “condimims.” Here, in air that is hot and dewy all year round, she practices the art of preservation. Nearly all of her groceries go immediately into the refrigerator, even a jar of individually wrapped hard candies, even a box of salt. The ironing board stays permanently erected; she is continually pressing the moisture from garments, hanging them crisply in closets like strips of cured meat. Photographs deck the walls and tabletops, lie under stiff blankets of glass—Sam and the boys, Max and Oscar, and the boys’ wives and their children, and, recently, a great-granddaughter. Her family: the happy years.

  The pictures of her own childhood are relatively few, her memories of that time correspondingly scant. For all the care she lavishes on storing items and details—the assortment of unused key rings hung in neat rows on the kitchen peg-board; the blood pressure and diet charts she picks up at the shopping center and posts on the freezer door; the drawer full of playing cards that come free with air travel, all still in their cellophane jackets—they are exclusively the items and details of her present life. Old jewelry, clothes, and photographs—these she has systematically discarded, foisting them on children and grandchildren, shucking their confusing weight. She is no caretaker of the past; it was never hers to cherish.

  Not even her memory belongs to her. The facts of her childhood jog and shift, are worn down like bits of sea glass, the real memories supplanted by stories she has been told, for a deaf girl’s reality is easily manipulated by the parcelers of information. Sitting at the wooden table in my parents’ kitchen, she once gave me three different accounts of how she became deaf in the space of five minutes: she was born that way; she fell off an ironing board when she was one; she developed an infection at age five.

  My father, bent over the cutting board mixing up tuna fish for lunch, broke in. “No, Ma!” he cried, setting the fork down so he could sign. “That’s not right, you weren’t born deaf!”

  My grandmother looked at him, her mouth working the way it does when she’s reading someone’s lips. She is strong and blocky, with short light hair and a face cross-hatched by fine pale lines. She sat with her hands clasped. One thumbnail began grinding against the fleshy pad of the opposite thumb.

  “I fell,” she said. “One year old. My mother had the ironing and she dropped me off the board.” My grandmother’s speech is easy to understand. The intonation is mostly flat, the end consonants are often missing, and her teeth and tongue and lips often clash unexpectedly, producing extraneous sounds, so that her words may snap and sigh like a plastic bag caught in a breeze. But still, her speech is intelligible, and it is the mode of communication she uses most frequently with hearing people, even her sons.

  My father signed back in rapid response. “You think you became deaf from falling off an ironing board?” As usual, he signed and spoke simultaneously. He sounded gruff because he was confused. His eyes appeared very gray, deep in their sockets under the dark ledge of his eyebrows.

  “She dropped me. Off the board, the board for ironing. They told me I fell off. I don’t know, I was a baby.” Her teeth worried the inside of her lower lip; her nail ground ridges in her thumb. Suddenly she remembered something else: “My mother dropped me on the kitchen floor. When I was born. I didn’t know that. Ida said. You understand what I mean, Ocky? She dropped me on the floor.” My grandmother made the sign for giving birth.

  “You mean she had you at home, you weren’t born in a hospital? No, I didn’t know that. You never told me. And then when you were one, you fell off an ironing board and became deaf? . . . No, Ma! You can’t have been deaf when you were one. You used the phone. You told me you remember using the telephone. You had to have been older before you became deaf. It was from infection, you told me.”

  She peered at him, again working the information with her knotty lips, the corners of her eyes twisted up in little winces. Then: the tiniest of shrugs, a nod. “You’re right. That’s right, Ocky. I don’t know, you’re right.” She shook her head, dispersing the fragments of memory, and turned to look out the window.

  After a moment, my father picked up the bread knife and began slicing rolls. I could feel him thinking in the quiet of the kitchen. “I don’t know,” he said to me after a minute. “That’s strange, what she said.” With his back to us, he could speak without my grandmother knowing.

  I looked at her. She was watching a couple of sparrows dine in the birdfeeder mounted outside the windowsill. A bluejay swooped in, matter-of-factly bossing the little mottled birds off their perch.

  “Mmm-hmm,” I answered, eyeing my grandmother, being careful to move neither my mouth nor my chest and risk gaining her attention. I was complicit and expert in this old habit of talking around her. How must that be—not knowing the facts of your own life story, subsisting on only the morsels dished out directly to you, usi
ng your memories, relegated to dubious fictions, like thin gruel to fill in the gaps? My father went on fixing our lunch while I watched my grandmother watch the jay crack open his seeds.

  She had been alive for nearly a quarter of a century before the happy part of her life began. This she defines as the time she stopped living with hearing relatives and moved into her own home. Earlier memories are sparse and sour.

  From the ages of six to fifteen, Fannie was a student at P.S. 47. Like most schools for the deaf at that time, it was an oral environment; signing was forbidden. On her first day, Ida dragged her into the classroom, bald and sobbing, and deposited her there without any explanation of where she was or what was happening. Of the following nine years Fannie remembers almost nothing, except for one day, shortly after her mother’s death, when she could not find her way to school. The big gray building on Twenty-third Street, the block, the subway stop, her very sense of place—all had abandoned her. In the most profound sense, she was lost. Shifting between the thin cots where she laid her head at Ida’s and Yetta’s, with Benzion so often at sea and Pearl vanished absolutely, Fannie was untethered, adrift.

  On that day when she was eleven years old, this was manifested in a most literal fashion: her body lost the ability to navigate the same path it had taken every morning for five years. Instead, seemingly of their own volition, her feet led her to her father’s furrier business in the garment district. She showed up dazed and murmured that she was lost. Someone fetched Benzion (he was not on one of his voyages); when he saw his truant daughter, he responded with pragmatic efficiency by delivering her straight to P.S. 47. A wordless question had been asked and answered; thereafter Fannie went to school on her own, never again wavering from her prescribed path.

  Four years later, with a fat white gardenia pinned to her blouse, Fannie graduated with her class. She had done poorly in history and geography, well in composition and math. She had also distinguished herself in speech, a subject particularly prized in a school where, if a student was caught signing, a flag colored red for shame was flown outside the classroom door. Armed with these skills and a crisply scrolled diploma, Fannie landed her first job: cutting fabric swatches and pasting them in display books used in showrooms. The job had the earmarks of a position that a hearing person would think fitting for a deaf employee: it was solitary and dull. Fannie earned ten dollars a week, which she promptly handed over to Benzion.

  The following summer she met her future husband while staying with her sisters in a rented seaside bungalow in Brooklyn. Her older brother Izzy knew Samuel Cohen from the Coney Island deaf club and had once shown him a snapshot of his youngest sister in a bathing suit. “Just watch,” Sam had told his friends when he saw this image of Fannie Hager. ”I’m going to get her!” During the summer of 1930, amid the clusters of alumni from the various schools for the deaf who gathered at Ocean Parkway in their own animated social network, he had his chance. They met one afternoon on the beach; their courtship began when Fannie agreed to meet him again that very evening on the boardwalk. She was sixteen, Sam twenty-two. She didn’t fall in love with him so much as succumb to the wonderful ballast of his love for her.

  None of Fannie’s relatives approved of the relationship. Sam could not talk. With Fannie’s good speech, couldn’t she at least get an oral deaf man, maybe even a hard-of-hearing man? Even Izzy, her deaf brother, tried to convince her to stop seeing Sam. With no speech skills, what were his chances of earning a living? Besides, Izzy had him pegged as a hapless charmer who cared more about basketball than steady employment. “He’s no diamond,” Izzy warned, and slapped her across the face. But Fannie wouldn’t be dissuaded.

  Sam and Fannie dated steadily and married four years later. They moved in with Sam’s mother and two sisters, who lived on Church Street in Brooklyn. Fannie hated it. She felt bossed and bullied by her hearing sisters-in-law. The young couple had to sleep out on the sunporch. And Sam did have trouble holding a job. He found sporadic work as a clothcutter but was always among the first to be let go during layoffs, an easy choice for employers, who figured the deaf guy couldn’t complain.

  It was a hearing woman, a social worker, who helped him gain job stability. Mrs. Tanya Nash, a pioneer in advocacy for the deaf, could persuade potential employers to give deaf applicants a chance and pressure discriminating employers to use fair labor practices. Today, there are laws to protect the rights of deaf people, and a state agency—Vocational and Educational Services for Individuals with Disabilities—provides counselors and services to assist with continuing education and job placement. But at the time Mrs. Nash was unique, and her reputation circulated widely in the greater metropolitan deaf community: Have a problem? Go see Mrs. Nash.

  Sam went to see her, and she helped him get into the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union. Once he had a union job, he and Fannie were at last able to move into their own apartment: one and a half rooms on University Avenue in the Bronx, with an alcove-kitchen, a bridge table in the foyer for meals, and a bedroom where they all slept—Fannie, Sam, and their hearing son, Max, born just a few months before they moved.

  Fannie was twenty-four years old and, for the first time in her life, happy. When she describes the rooms of her first apartment, she grows excited and quite pretty, her cheeks leaping up, her eyes growing dark and rich with remembered images. In this apartment she got her bearings and her autonomy. No one gave her orders or made her feel inferior. It was a deaf home and she spoke the mother tongue.

  Soon they were able to get a larger apartment, two rooms on Gun Hill Road, off Mosholu Parkway, and soon after that they moved around the corner to three rooms below street level on Knox Place, where they would remain for more than thirty years. By then they had two sons, Max and Oscar, both of them hearing. The boys grew up bilingual in ASL and English. The neighborhood was called the Parkway, and it teemed with street life; the boys knocked chestnuts and played curb ball and punch ball and stickball and never suffered for lack of exposure to hearing culture.

  They never suffered for lack of good parenting, either. Fannie mothered with vigor, passion, and a sixth sense that was almost witchlike in its accuracy. Her devotion was such that she seemed to be compensating for the neglect that had characterized her own childhood. All three of her men lived under the powerful gaze of her love, which she leveled with a sometimes irritating, if not frightening, scrutiny. If one of them coughed and she was standing across the room with her back to him, she would spin around and demand, “What’s the matter! You’re sick?” Yelling her name from the same spot would trigger nothing, but a cough or a sneeze, as if transmitted along some rare, unknown frequency, yielded immediate action.

  Every week she transformed Sam’s modest salary into ample, delicious meals. Deaf or not, she prided herself on being choosy, and when it came to feeding her family she could be a battering ram, prepared to rush all communication barriers. Once, at dinner, she began to serve her family a steak she had cooked, only to find the meat rather tough. Fannie seized the serving dish off the table and marched it straight up to the butcher shop on Jerome Avenue, where she demanded that the butcher sample a bite. He never sold her another piece of tough meat.

  If one of her boys was in trouble, she became the staunchest of defenders. When Oscar was a gym monitor in the eleventh grade at DeWitt Clinton High School, he once got caught playing poker in the locker room with several other boys. The dean, Abraham Feibush, summoned their parents to school for a talk. Oscar coached Fannie strenuously before the fateful meeting. “Ma, just promise me, don’t tell the dean it was the other boys’ fault. Okay? Just listen and agree with him. And please, whatever you do, please don’t tell the dean that I’m a good boy and blame the others. Okay? Promise me.”

  At the appointed time, Oscar accompanied his mother to the school and sat with her outside Dean Feibush’s office until she was called. Although Fannie’s lip-reading skills are excellent, they are not sufficient for every situation. In the best circumstanc
es, only about 30 percent of speech is visible on the lips; the rest is conjecture. To alleviate frustration and misunderstanding, Oscar went prepared to interpret, and when Fannie was called, he started to follow her into the office. He was halted at the door by the dean’s bark: “Stay there, Cohen!” The door slammed shut. Twenty seconds passed. The door reopened. “Cohen, get in here!”

  Dean Feibush sat behind his desk, trying to maintain a semblance of command. “Cohen, ask your mother if she knows what you’ve done.”

  Oscar flushed and signed to his mother, “The dean says to ask you if you know what I’ve done.”

  Fannie signed back, “Tell the dean it wasn’t you, it was the other boys.”

  “Ma! I told you not to say that!”

  “Go on, Ocky, tell the dean you’re a good boy.”

  “What’s she saying, Cohen?”

  “Uh, she says to tell you I’m sorry and it’ll never happen again, sir.”

  “Very well,” pronounced Dean Feibush, brightening as he decided to make this an abbreviated conference. “Now Cohen, I want you to tell your mother to tell you not to play cards and to be a good boy.”

  Oscar’s color deepened as he faced his mother once again to deliver the inevitable punchline.

  As a deaf parent of hearing children, Fannie negotiated two worlds, sometimes working double-time to satisfy the demands of each. When Oscar had his bar mitzvah, she threw a party at Knox Place, preparing everything herself: thirty-three pounds of whitefish and carp chopped into gefilte fish, two roast turkeys, potato salad, coleslaw, and from the bakery challah and two sheet cakes. In the afternoon, the hearing relatives came. That night, the entire event was repeated for the family’s deaf friends. The first party was obligatory, the second a pleasure. Two separate worlds, two separate events. And after they were over, Fannie took sick from exhaustion for several days.