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

by Uhlberg, Myron

  Stepping onto the train that day, I took the final step, the step from my parents’ deaf world, so familiar yet so foreign, to my own world, the world of the hearing.

  Thereafter, when I was with my parents, I would be only a visitor to their world of eternal silence. It had been, for me, a world of great beauty filled with limitless love and, God help me, frequent shame. It had also been a difficult world in which a child had had to play the role of an adult.

  The sign for responsibility is a dramatic one and leaves little room for doubt as to its meaning. It was one of the first signs my father taught me. He would place both hands, fingertips relentlessly pressing downward, on his right shoulder. His shoulder would slump, as if bearing a great burden, and his face would assume a look of patient endurance. This was what was always expected of me: to be responsible—for my father and his needs, and then when my brother became sick, for my brother, too. There were times when I found this burden crushing, and those were the days when I would rush from my apartment to the roof of our building and hide for hours on end.

  Now as I sat on the cushioned seat of the railroad car directly over the iron wheels that relentlessly carried me away, with each revolution, from the only home I had ever known, I felt a lifting of this ever-present burden of responsibility. From now on I would not be responsible for my father or my brother. They would have to manage for themselves.

  My mother and father after a football game at Brandeis University, 1951. We won.

  My sense of relief, however, was diluted by an inexplicable sense of loss. It had never occurred to me that I would feel that way.

  26

  The Duke of Coney Island

  My uncle David was my mother’s favorite of her three brothers. “He is a magician, a sorcerer,” she always said of this brother, who was one year younger than she. David was a sorcerer to my mother because, with a wink of his devilish brown eyes, he could transform her sadness into joy. He treated her deafness with remarkable nonchalance. Where every other member of her family made my mother feel different, David acted as if her deafness were nothing more important, or significant, than the color of her eyes or the texture of her hair.

  Everyone in my mother’s family, as well as all of his many friends, called David “the Duke of Coney Island.” This was in acknowledgment of his suave manner, his elegant clothes, and the way he managed to get by in such high style with no steady job.

  David and my mother were both splendid swimmers. With the sun rising over the beach at Coney Island, holding hands and laughing, they would launch themselves into the Atlantic Ocean and swim until they were out of sight. My mother’s powerful, tanned arms would cleave the water, and she and her white bathing cap would grow ever smaller until, at the edge of the horizon, she and David disappeared.

  I always waited patiently on the shore, my father and brother at my side. My father, who was great with his hands, helped us build the most intricate and fantastic sand castles, as we sat and waited for my mother to emerge from the sea.

  My father never joined my mother in the water, as he could barely swim three consecutive strokes without stopping to gasp for air. But before diving in himself, David always made a show of grabbing my father’s arm and trying to drag him into the water, while my brother took the other arm and, digging his toes into the sand, pulled in the other direction. This was just a game they played—there was no way my father would go into the ocean with David. “I grew up in the Bronx,” my father would explain, if anyone wondered why he remained on shore. “No ocean.” For him, that explained almost everything, the Bronx being a provincial backwater to cosmopolitan Brooklyn, with its magnificent stone bridge at one end and the great Atlantic Ocean washing up on the beach at the other.

  Eventually, with the sun now high in the sky, I would spot a white dot bobbing between the swells. As I watched, the dot became my mother, her strong brown arms cutting through the water as she swam to shore, followed closely by David.

  Sometimes she caught me unawares. Riding an incoming wave like a porpoise, she would slither from the surf, a sea creature, and take my sun-warmed body into her icy-wet embrace.

  “Where did you go?” I always asked.

  “Ireland,” she finger-spelled, with a straight face. “Very green.”

  In addition to being a great swimmer and a sorcerer, David was a wizard. He could do magic tricks—wondrous, surpassingly amazing sleight-of-hand stunts that left me gasping.

  Beginning when I turned six, he began the ritual of pulling objects from my ear on every birthday. That first year it was a penny. When I turned seven, it was a nickel. At eight, he produced a dime from the depths of my ear. And at nine, a quarter. The following year it was a half-dollar.

  The year I turned eleven, my uncle David, after much hocus-pocus, rolled up the sleeve of his right arm and, with great exaggeration, displayed his empty hand under my nose. Wiggling the five digits in the air, he proceeded with infinite slowness to curl his middle finger, then the finger to its left, and finally his pinky into a ball. With the remaining forefinger and thumb, he formed a pincered claw.

  Slowly he moved the claw to my ear, then into my ear, and with much grunting and twisting, he extracted a gleaming uncirculated silver dollar. It was magnificent.

  Placing the silver dollar on its edge, with a deft twist of his fingers he set it spinning on a nearby surface. “This coin reminds me of you,” he said before the coin came to a stop. I nodded solemnly, not having a clue as to his meaning.

  Many years later, when we were both living in Los Angeles, I was riding in a car with my uncle when he asked me if I remembered my eleventh birthday and the silver dollar he had pulled from my ear.

  He then explained what he had meant to say to me that day when he had set the coin spinning. As a child, David said, I always seemed to him to be two sides of the same coin, both one thing and its opposite. I was cleaved into two parts, half hearing, half deaf, forever joined together. And he had observed, very astutely, that I vacillated and vibrated between the child that I was in years and the adult I was forced to be in thought and action. When he looked at me, he saw that I stood at the crossroads of sound and silence, of childhood and adulthood, and that I would have to struggle to find my own way.

  With his explanation I realized, perhaps as never before, how hard I had fought, all of my young life, to break free from my father’s eternal need of me. It was a struggle that I waged to assert my independence, my very right to be a child. But it was a struggle I fought with one small hand tied behind my back, since I could not let my father think for even one moment that I was abandoning him and the overpowering burden of his deafness.

  On that long ride I took with my uncle, across Mulholland, over the Sepulveda Pass, and down into the Valley, heading toward his apartment, I thought about the other side of my childhood’s equation: my mother’s need of me. As her firstborn hearing son, I met a need in her that was of an exclusively practical, utilitarian nature. Unlike my father, she used me only for the nuts and bolts of her everyday forced interactions with the hearing world: What is the price of this? The availability of that?

  Perhaps the differences between my mother and father had to do with the fact that my mother had been deafened as an infant. She had no memory of sound, which for her was intangible, an abstraction, merely an idea. But my father, unlike my mother, had been deafened later in life. Until the age of three he could hear. Somewhere, buried in the folds of his brain, was the memory of sound. That memory, elusive, fragmentary, would not release him. It hovered somewhere always on the horizon of his consciousness. Through me he would try to find it, to tease it into being. And he looked to me to provide the clues.

  My father needed me to help him remember sound. To understand sound itself. The very essence of sound. Sound in all its guises. Sound in all its permutations. The shape and physicality of sound. Even the color of sound. Or as a synesthete might, the sound of color.

  He struggled all of my young life to fath
om spoken speech. How could it be that speech emerged from the mouth of the hearing invisible, yet had substance? How did sound travel invisibly through the equally invisible air to enter the hearing ear, where it rushed over and caressed a billion tiny hairs deep in the ear canal, like sea grass waving tremulously to the un heard tune of invisible currents?

  And the biggest mystery of all: How did the vibrations transmit sound to the mind, where it was heard?

  His questions began when I was six years old. I could never answer them satisfactorily, and they would not cease until I left his deaf world forever, twelve years later, college-bound.

  Once I was no longer a trusted resident of his world, merely a visitor, something changed between us and his questions ceased. Many years later I realized that with my departure, his unquenchable quest for the understanding of sound had ended; he had asked no more questions of me.

  To this day, when I think of my father, and I recall so vividly the intensity of my childhood, I remember my uncle David’s birthday gift: the silver dollar.

  Oh, how I wish I had saved it. I would set it spinning. What would it tell me now?

  27

  Death, a Stranger

  I knew of death early and late.

  When I was six year sold, I saw a man standing on the edge of an apartment house roof on my block. He had been standing there for sometime, motionless, on the low brick wall that was the dividing line between the tar-papered, gravel-covered roof to his back and the air over Brooklyn at his feet. Staring straight ahead, he could see the Atlantic Ocean at Coney Island. Looking down, he could see the concrete sidewalk of West Ninth Street, six floors below his feet.

  I watched, hypnotized, in a state of incomprehension, alongside a group of neighbors at the curb directly across the street from the building. We stood there, looking up at him, as he poured gasoline over his head and shoulders and, in one incandescent instant, lit a match and burst into flame.

  As I watched in stunned disbelief, not really understanding what my eyes were telling my brain, he calmly stepped off the roof in a ball of fire. Trailing sparks and bits of flaming clothing, he fell directly onto the low iron picket fence that fronted the building. The fence buckled at the impact of his falling body. He lay impaled on a pike of the picket fence, smoldering, his clothing turning to ash as the green paint on the fence blistered, then bubbled away. For weeks afterward I would come across bits of charred fabric lying around the building.

  The man was a stranger. He had come to our block to die. My father could not tell me why. For once, his hands were silent.

  Many years later, when I was an army paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division, my father and mother came down to visit me at Fort Bragg, near Fayetteville, North Carolina, where I was stationed. And, of course, my father had timed their visit to coincide with a mass parachute jump, which is always an impressive sight. As wave after wave of C-119s took off from Pope Air Force Base, each wave of planes flew at an altitude barely fifty feet above the preceding wave, leaving just enough space between them that their propellers would not chew up the jumpers hanging in the air in front of them. In stately formation they passed over the three-mile-long sandy drop zone, thousands of parachutists jumping out the twin doors. The sky was filled, horizon to horizon, with slowly descending white silk petals. But one of those parachutists got into trouble. His static line had become entangled with the shoulder strap on his parachute.

  The soldier dangled at the end of the canvas line for hours, as the crew, the copilot, and jumpmaster vainly attempted to pull him back into the plane, against the backstream of the twin propellers. It was useless, as the pressure of the turbulent air created by the backdraft of the propellers was simply too powerful a force to overcome.

  Once the plane had burned up all its fuel flying in circles for hours, a layer of foam was sprayed on the runway and the plane was forced to land. As it rolled down the runway, the body trailed behind and bounced up and down in the foam.

  It was later reported that the soldier had been unconscious when the plane touched down. But we all knew that was bull.

  That evening my father talked about death. This was strange, because my father had never brought up the subject before. Even when his father died and we went to his funeral in the Bronx, my father had barely signed a thought to me. And when his mother had died, he cried but did not talk.

  But during dinner that night he talked of death. The sign for death is one of the most poignant of signs, and one of the most descriptive in its abrupt visual expressiveness. It leaves no doubt as to its meaning. My father, in expressing his feelings about death and dying that night, constantly held his open hands in front of him, right palm down, death, left palm up, life. In that position, he stared at them thoughtfully and then reversed them.

  “Death,” he signed, “is a stranger. Just like the stranger who came to our street to die.”

  Later, much later, in another season, my father spent his last day on earth in the same hospital in Coney Island where I was born. There was not one person around him to whom he could express his resignation, his regrets, or his fears in his own language.

  It has been twenty-nine years since my father died, alone, in a hospital ward in Brooklyn, filled with strangers who could not speak to him and who could not read his hands. If he had had the strength to do so, he would surely have left his bed and walked the few feet to a window of the ward to look out on the sandy beach of Coney Island, where fifty years previously he had first seen the dark-haired laughing deaf girl who would become his wife.

  My mother and I had been with him all that day (my brother, at the time, was working in Virginia), and we had just gone out to get something to eat. My mother had signed as she left his bedside, “We’ll be right back.” When we returned to his room, barely an hour after we left him, his bed was empty and had been neatly remade.

  No one on the floor could tell us where my father was.

  “Try the morgue,” one nurse advised over her shoulder as she rushed about.

  With my frantic mother at my side, we descended in the elevator to the basement morgue.

  Exiting the elevator, we found ourselves in a dimly lit circular lobby empty of any living people—but filled end to end with sheet-covered gurneys. My mother jackknifed into herself and stayed closed as if she would never open again. I held her to me.

  Unfolding finally, she shook me off and went to the first gurney. She lifted the sheet, glanced at the face beneath, and moved on. From gurney to gurney she repeated the process: lift a corner of the sheet, take a quick look, and move on. Eventually, she stopped moving on, and flung herself across the cold, still body of my dead father.

  At the entrance to the Brooklyn cemetery where my father was to be buried, a short line of Orthodox Jewish men stood forlornly along the roadside in the lightly falling rain, hoping to make a few dollars for reciting Kaddish, the traditional Hebrew blessing. My mother asked me to hire one of them to say what she considered to be magic words over her husband’s grave.

  At my father’s open grave, the endless string of words, unheard by my mother and incomprehensible to the rest of us—my brother, my wife, my children, my mother’s sister, and my father’s two sisters and his brother—droned on endlessly, until I tapped the black-garbed bearded stranger on the shoulder, thanked him, and gave him the agreed-upon payment for his services. Then we stood there, looking at my father’s dripping coffin sitting on twin rails, each of us thinking about the man inside, now silent, as we all will be.

  My mother lived another twenty-eight years and remained in relatively good physical health until she was eighty-nine. That year, however, a series of medical problems made it clear she could no longer live on her own.

  My brother loved our mother deeply but was still working full-time, now for the City of New York. He agreed that since I was retired and could give her the attention she needed, I would take her with me to Palm Springs (where my wife and I had moved many years before).

&nbs
p; No sooner had she settled into her new life with us than she fell to the floor one night and suffered a broken hip—the first of many accidents and illnesses that would slowly but steadily drain her body and her spirit.

  During the next six years she would sporadically sign to me, “I want to die!”

  “No, you don’t,” I would say rather inanely. “You have so much to live for.” And then I would frantically enumerate all the things I thought she should live for.

  My mother would turn away from me, unconvinced.

  In frustration one day, I added to the list of things to live for, “Wait, I wrote a book.”

  “You wrote a book?” she signed incredulously. “What’s it about?”

  “A big snowstorm in Brooklyn,” I said, “and a boy who has a dream, and the mother who wakes him with her kiss.”

  “Sounds interesting. I’ll wait for that.”

  And so my mother lived another six years, waiting first for that book, and then when it was published, and she said, again, “I want to die!” the next book after that one.

  Twice a year Irwin would fly out to visit our mother. Her absence from his life was a significant loss. His apartment in New York City had been convenient to hers, and he had been in the habit of visiting her one night during the week, and taking her to a movie and then to dinner on Sundays. With so much time to make up for, my brother found that his biannual ten-day visits seemed to end as soon as they began, which was very hard for him.

  Shortly before she died, my mother had been in the hospital on one of her ever more frequently recurring admissions. One morning on my daily visit I found her deeply asleep. Her veined, liver-spotted hands were resting silently at her sides. As I sat by her bed watching, they came alive and began to sign in a language I did not understand. As a boy, I had often seen my mother and father signing their private signs to each other. Signs whose meaning they never shared with me. However, one sign I did recognize: the sign for death.