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

by Uhlberg, Myron

  I could swear I saw my father mutter to himself in sign, “I’ll murder that guy.”

  My mother signed a greeting to Ben, then held his arms to his sides, silencing him, and turned to my father with a smile from ear to ear.

  If my father had been an Eskimo Pie, he would have melted in the warmth of that smile.

  12

  The Triangle and the Chihuahua

  Long ago, children in Brooklyn public schools were exposed to more than academic and “practical” subjects. In addition to art appreciation, there was music appreciation. But this form of appreciation found me as wanting as art appreciation did, since I was virtually tone deaf.

  In my very first music class our teacher had us sing “God Bless America,” while she tinkled away on her slightly off-key piano. As early fall sunlight streamed through the tall grimy windows of the music appreciation room, slanting dusty bars of golden light illuminated our efforts to mouth the lyrics. Unfortunately for me, one of those revealing bars of light illuminated my lips, which had remained closed throughout the duration of the song. My failure to participate did not go unnoticed.

  “Myron,” the teacher inquired, “has the cat got your tongue?”

  “No, ma’am,” I managed to get out.

  “Let’s do it over,” she said to the class, “so Myron can join in.”

  I tried, I surely did, but after only a few bars the piano died, and with it my public school singing career.

  “Myron,” the teacher said ever so gently, “from now on you will be in charge of the most important element in the overall success of our chorus.”

  And with that she placed in my hands a piece of metal in the shape of a triangle.

  “What’s this?” I asked. “It looks like a triangle.”

  “Exactly,” she exclaimed. “How clever of you to understand so quickly.”

  From that moment on I was never to sing a single note. Instead I stood at the rear of the chorus, holding my triangle by a string grasped in one hand while striking it gently, pretty much as the mood struck me, with a slim metal wand held in the other. Of course, the occasional slight tinkles of sound were drowned out by the robust voices of my classmates.

  “Practice,” my teacher instructed me after presenting me with the triangle. “Practice makes perfect,” she added, and sent me home with the triangle without another word. To do what? I wondered. To practice, I surmised.

  And so it was that I proudly climbed the three flights of stairs that afternoon, triangle held carefully under my arm, steel wand safely in my pocket. Greeting my mother and brother at the door to our apartment, I waved the triangle at them, very full of myself.

  “I’m a musician,” I signed to her, while also announcing it out loud to my brother. “My teacher said I’m the most important part of our chorus.”

  “That’s nice,” my mother, a daughter of the Great Depression, signed right back. “Sit. You look hungry. I’ll make you both some matzoh brei.”

  “But I have to practice. My teacher said so.”

  “Eat first—you’ll have more strength to practice,” she signed emphatically, her hands moving away from her chest, turning into fists.

  My mother always said that her theory about life was that any problem could be faced, and overcome, with nothing more than a full stomach.

  That evening, as usual, my father came home with the day’s newspaper under his arm.

  “There is much to talk about,” he signed dramatically to my brother and me. “The news today is exciting.”

  After dinner every evening, while my mother was doing the dishes, my father, brother, and I sat at the kitchen table while he signed the headlines to us. Then he explained the importance of each headline. Most of the news was about the happenings in Europe and England and about two funny men, one short and fat with a thrust-out jaw, the other with a bad haircut and a spot of mustache on his upper lip. My father could imitate Hitler as well as Charlie Chaplin. Although the news in Europe was bad, my father had me and my brother laughing while he mimed Mussolini’s strutting walk and Hitler’s silly salute and his promise to take over the whole world. Little did we know just how close he would come.

  Mussolini and Hitler were the bad guys. FDR was the good guy, with Winnie Churchill a close second. Things were very clear to me in those days.

  “I have something exciting to tell you, too,” my signs interrupted my father. “I’m the backbone of the class chorus,” I added in finger-spelling, as I had no sign for backbone.

  I ran to my room and quickly returned with my triangle.

  “See,” I signed. “This is a triangle, and my teacher is counting on me to learn how to use it. ‘Practice,’ she said, ‘and the chorus will follow you.’”

  “My son, the musician,” my father signed in all seriousness.

  “How would you like to have a chihuahua?” He spelled with exquisite care and exactitude. Watching his fingers spell this new long word filled with so many h’s connected with so many u’s and assorted a’s left me dizzy. And right in the middle of an h and a u, his face broke into a broad grin. I was well aware of my father’s sense of humor and how he would often set me up for one of his jokes. But I figured I’d play the straight man and go along with him on this one, like George Burns always did with Gracie on the radio.

  “What is a chihuahua?” I finger-spelled right back to him, adding a dozen extra h’s, u’s, and a’s.

  “It’s a dog,” he signed, patting his knee and snapping his fingers. Then so he was perfectly clear, his open right hand, imitating a paw, brushed his right ear repeatedly. “A very little dog, with very big ears.”

  Since we lived in Brooklyn, in a small apartment, the subject of dogs of any size rarely if ever came up as a topic of conversation. But as I watched my father’s signs, I could actually see this tiny, alert dog with its inquisitive, intelligent face. My father’s signs were so expressive, I could almost hear the squeaky bark emanating from this sketch of a dog that he painted on the air.

  “Xavier Cugat,” he finger-spelled the name, “the great rumba bandleader, has a chihuahua in his pocket when he leads his band. And now that you have a triangle, I think you could use a dog in your pocket as well.”

  And with that he gently pulled my mother from the sink, apron and all, and began to twirl her around the kitchen, the two of them smoothly sliding across the waxed linoleum floor to a rumba beat that only they could hear.

  The night of the school concert finally arrived. The auditorium was filled to capacity. Not a single Brooklyn parent was about to miss hearing their precious, incredibly gifted child perform that special evening.

  My father, mother, and brother came early so that they would have front-row seats. Although they wouldn’t be able to hear me banging on my triangle, my father and mother wanted to be close enough to see me and imagine the beautiful sounds I must surely be making.

  Noticing my parents talking to each other in exaggerated signs, my teacher moved me to the front of the chorus, to the very edge of the stage.

  With the passing of so many years, my memory of that evening is dim. I do vaguely recall my futile attempts to strike my triangle in time with the music, but I was always chasing the rhythm, always a few beats behind.

  Yet my memory is crystal clear when it comes to the look of undisguised pride on my father’s and mother’s faces, as they sat enraptured—there is no other word for it—by my musicality. Being stone deaf, they heard not a sound, and I, forlornly beating away at my triangle, was deaf in my own way.

  After the concert I continued to hold on to the image that my father’s hands had painted of Xavier Cugat’s chihuahua, peeking out of the bandleader’s pocket at the dancers box-stepping the rumba. My father was the artist of that picture, and like so many others that he had created for me, it now hung with the rest of them in the picture gallery of my mind. So sharp was that image that I now wanted the dog that he had sketched with such vividness.

  The best way to begin my campa
ign for a dog, I reasoned, was with my mother. She would be the one member of the family who would be around to care for my dog when my brother and I were at school and my father was at work. I needed her approval before I approached my father.

  I planned my campaign well and with exacting care, taking into account all that I knew about my mother. Surely, I reasoned, I would not bring up the subject on an empty stomach. Only after eating my fill, preferably to near bursting, would I talk about a dog to my mother, for only then could I be sure of being able to talk without being interrupted by the dreaded command, “Sit. Eat.”

  But when I did finally raise the subject, without hesitation my mother launched into a long rambling story about the time when she was a child and had also wanted a dog. Her reasons were quite different from my own.

  “Every Sunday night my father took me by subway from my home in Coney Island to my school, the Lexington School for the Deaf, on Lexington Avenue in the city.

  “I attended classes all week long and slept in the dorm with my friends at night. That was where we learned sign language—first from the older girls, and then from one another. We talked in sign all night long, since signing was absolutely forbidden by our hearing teachers during the daytime. Oh, we were so naughty.” Here she made the sign for bad, but the gestures that accompanied it, lips compressed into a sly grin and shoulders lifted in a girls-will-be-girls shrug, signaled that what she meant was: not really bad but rather naughty.

  By now, my proficiency in sign had grown to the point that I was able without even thinking to discern the subtleties of my parents’ language. A sign could have multiple meanings, depending upon the context and the manner in which it was conveyed: the shape of the hands in making the sign, the utilization of facial grammar, the positioning of the hands relative to the body, and indeed the use of the entire body. Thus bad became naughty that day, but with my mother’s expressive ability in sign, it might just as well have become evil, nasty, or wicked, depending on the context. Through my parents’ hands, bodies, and faces, individual signs recombined effortlessly to communicate volumes of information.

  I always marveled at my mother’s signing ability and was aware that it was more fluid, expressive, and expansive than my father’s. I had always assumed that that was because my mother went to deaf school at a younger age than my father did, and so learned the language earlier. But underlying that was the difference in their basic personalities. My father was practical, direct, forceful, and narrowly focused—and so was his signing. My mother, on the other hand, was more emotional and very much a dreamer, as well as a born storyteller. I could get lost in her picturesque, all-enveloping signs.

  My mother and her friends signing to one another at the Lexington School for the Deaf, circa 1922.

  “When the lights were turned out,” she continued, “we went to the bathroom, where a light was always on, and we talked till our eyes refused to stay open. We loved to talk to one another in our language. We lived for sign, and the ability to communicate with one another was like the water of life, our oasis of language and meaning, in the midst of the huge expanse of desert silence and incomprehension that was the greater hearing world.

  “Every Friday night my father came to get me, and together we took the subway back to Brooklyn. We had to take two different subway lines to get to Coney Island, the end of the Sea Beach line. The trip seemed to take forever, and in all that time my father said not a word to me. He did not know a single sign, other than the few he had made up during the years I was a child. These were feeble signs that I was embarrassed to repeat to my school friends. They were primitive crude things lacking grace and meaning. They made me feel simpleminded, almost backward, and they embarrassed me even when I used them with my father and mother. That was the speech of an idiot. I was not an idiot.”

  My mother’s hands stopped in midsentence. Suspended in the air in front of her body, they seemed to be thinking. Remembering.

  “I loved my mother. I loved my father. I loved my younger sister and my three younger brothers. But not one of them knew me. They never learned my language. We were strangers all the years of my childhood. There were times I wished I was blind, not deaf. Then I could have heard my mother’s voice. I could have told her my fears and wishes, and my love for her.”

  My mother had never talked to me this way before. I began to be sorry I had asked for a dog. I did not understand why my request had triggered these memories, but I felt I had been selfish. And somewhere deep down I felt angry. I was angry that my mother had suffered so. I felt a sense of helplessness for the first time in my life, mirroring what my mother must have felt growing up. I felt the unfairness of her situation. My father was a fighter, a battler against the daily cruelties that the hearing unthinkingly levied against him. But my mother was cut from a different cloth; she wore the cloak of resignation. She was vulnerable. As I grappled with these conflicting emotions, she continued her story.

  “When my father and I arrived at our apartment in Coney Island on Friday night, my mother would greet me at the door with a tight smile on her thin lips, but always with a hug and a special light in her eyes.

  “She immediately took my hand and led me to the kitchen, which smelled of onions and garlic and Shabbes chicken.

  “This was my mother’s language of love: her cooking. Stingy with her emotions, never really smiling, she expressed her feelings for me in the thousand meals she prepared for me alone, often feeding me by hand long after I was old enough to feed myself.”

  My mother’s signs made my mouth water, and my eyes filled with tears. I was both sad and hungry watching my mother’s story unfold through her expressive hands.

  “After eating, I went to my room, where I stayed pretty much the entire weekend. My mother tried shooing me out the door, her crude signs suggesting I go downstairs and play with the other children. But I wouldn’t go. When I was younger, I tried to play with the other kids in the street. But they would run away from me in different directions, meeting later at some prearranged place, like an alleyway, where they regrouped, giggling at how they had escaped.”

  She stopped moving her hands and smiled at me.

  “But I was going to tell you my story about a dog, not all this stuff about chickens,” and she laughed.

  “I was a lonely child, always lonely in my own home. I could talk to no one in my family, and no one learned to talk to me. I wanted a dog to keep me company. One day I asked my father for a dog for my next birthday. He, perhaps out of guilt, readily agreed; he never denied me anything, except himself. For without a language to share, I never knew him.

  “One Saturday morning, while in a half sleep, I felt a furry busyness and a wet, hot tongue against my cheek. Awakening, I saw pressed against my face a bundle of orange fur. It was a puppy. I held the squirming orange fur ball at arm’s length, turning him this way and that, while he struggled to get free. He was perfect, and he was mine.

  “I said thank you…thank you…thank you…to my father, but as usual, when I spoke, his face squeezed shut. My parents always winced at the sound of my voice, so I knew it must be ugly. But for once I didn’t care. I had a dog of my own.

  “I named him Chubby. He would follow me wherever I went, from room to room, up and down the stairs of our apartment building, in and out of bed, everywhere. He loved me, and I loved him more than I had ever loved anything in my life.

  “And he grew. Boy, did he grow. Later I found out he was a full-blooded chow. They grow very large, and their full orange coat makes them seem even bigger.

  “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