Hands of My Father

by Myron Uhlberg

  Then my mother came around the table, kissed me, and signed, “Eat!”

  What's in a Name

  On my street Paul Abruzzi's nickname was Paulie; Frank was known as Frankie; Thomas, Tommy; John, Johnny; Ronald, Ronnie; and my pal Harold was called Heshie. I was the one kid on my block whose name, Myron, could not readily be turned into a nickname. But that didn't stop my friends from giving me one: Mike—and then, of course, Mikey.

  My mother would have been horrified, not to mention deeply offended, if she had known that I had abandoned what was, to her deaf ears, the beautiful-sounding name she had selected for me: Myron.

  But deaf parents typically create their own nicknames for their children, as it would be quite tedious and unnecessarily time-consuming to finger-spell every letter of a child's name when seeking his attention or talking with him. Thus they give their children names that can be conveniently— and succinctly—signed. Such nicknames are known as name-signs.

  A name-sign is not lightly decided upon. After all, this will be the way the parent addresses the child for the rest of his childhood—and often for the rest of his life.

  My mother loved the name Myron so much that she wanted it to be recalled in my name-sign. So her first attempt at creating one for me involved using the initials of my name, M and U. My mother reasoned that MU must sound like the noise that cows make—MOO. Looking at me one day, she shaped her hands into an approximation of a cow's horns by curling the three middle fingers inward to the palm and extending the thumb and pinky. These horns she placed on the sides of her head, thumbs touching her temples, and twisted them forward while sounding out in her deaf voice, MOOOO. “M.yr.o.n.,” she finger-spelled. “How do you like this name?”

  I didn't!

  One morning as I was about to run downstairs to play, my mother stopped me in my tracks and signed, “Wait! I have a new name for you.” The deaf believe that the ideal name-sign for a child should encapsulate in one visual gesture the very essence of the child. My mother's second idea for a name-sign must have seemed to her like a no-brainer. She was sure that it truly captured the nature of her beloved child—the boy who seemed most comfortable high up on the limb of a tree or climbing walls. She looked into my eyes and began to scratch her sides repeatedly—which, of course, is the sign for monkey.

  Needless to say, I rejected this name-sign, too. I did not want my mother coming up to me, while I was playing in the street with my friends, and addressing me with the sign for monkey.

  Unable to find a name-sign that I would accept, my mother went back to the way she had addressed me since she named me as a baby—MHHHAAARINNN.

  All of my life I never cared for my given name. I preferred to be known as Mike. My present wife, my two former wives, my three children, my grandchildren, my business associates, teammates, and friends, and even my bank all know me as Mike. In fact, when I left my deaf home, I ceased to be Myron to anyone except my parents. However, one day when talking with my mother—who had come to live with me at the age of eighty-nine, when she could no longer take care of herself—I summoned up the nerve to ask her why it was that she had named me Myron.

  My deaf mother, who could not hear a sound, did not hesitate for an instant: “Because it sounds so beautiful.”

  One day I received an advance copy of my first children's book. I immediately showed it to my mother. Holding it lovingly on her lap as if it were a live thing and not just a book, she slowly traced my name with her finger, while a broad smile spread across her face. “Beautiful,” she signed. “MHHHAAARINNN,” she said.

  I've preferred being called Myron ever since.

  11

  The Sound of Color

  In those halcyon early days of public education, long before children would be held strictly accountable to a national testing demanded by a government that acknowledged little accountability for itself, public schools in Brooklyn routinely offered a class in arts and crafts. I, who had no artistic ability whatsoever, would bring home every week a crinkled sheet of sketch paper covered in indecipherable scrawls, with occasional splotches of color. And I, like every one of my classmates, no doubt, would be routinely commended by my teacher, and lavishly praised by my parents, for my “work of art.”

  One day I showed my father a sketch I had done which, I explained—since an explanation seemed necessary—represented the Brooklyn Bridge.

  “And here are the seagulls.” I pointed proudly at a tangle of black lines.

  “Yes,” my father's hands tentatively said. “I think I see them.”

  Hanging over the tortured mess, I had colored in a red circle. A very red circle. It was the one spot of color on the entire page, my artistic sensibilities being quite cramped.

  “And that's the sun,” I signed with exaggerated imagination. “I call this ‘Morning in Brooklyn.’”

  My father stared at the red circle. “Red,” he told me, “is an angry color. It sounds loud. Very loud. So loud that it sometimes hurts my ears.”

  As I said, my father thought color had sound. I thought this strange, since my father was deaf and could hear no sound at all.

  “Why do you think that?” I once asked him.

  “In school I saw a painting of a man holding his ears. In the noisy picture the man was screaming. Above him the sky was an angry, swirling red color. I never forgot that painting.”

  “Blue was a cool color,” he said, fanning his face. “Like water and must sound wet.”

  I couldn't begin to imagine what my father meant. Wet? What did wet sound like, anyway?

  Hardly a day went by that my father did not find an occasion to ask me what a color sounded like.

  “How does the color black sound?” he asked me one summer day as we were walking on Surf Avenue in Coney Island. It was the middle of August, and we were on our way to the beach. Above us gray storm clouds were gathering. They filled the sky. They were beginning to bump into each other. Where they merged, the gray blended into black. And where they piled up, one massive black cloud upon another, they turned an even darker shade of black. A cold salt-laden breeze suddenly swept down Surf Avenue from the direction of Nathan's, loaded with the blended smells of grilled franks and mustard, knishes, hot buttered corn, and a subtle suggestion ofpopcorn.

  Day turned into night as lightning split the darkness, followed by claps of thunder. The clouds cracked open, and torrential rain poured from the sky, quickly turning the steaming asphalt into small debris-cluttered rivers, overwhelming the storm drains, then backing them up, causing miniature waves to break across Surf Avenue. The rides emptied and stopped. People ran for cover as the rain fell in wind-driven sheets of water. I tugged on my father's hand, but he stood still, looking up at the blackest sky I had ever seen.

  “What does black sound like?” he asked me again.

  Thunder loud enough to hurt my ears banged down on my head.

  “Like thunder,” I signed, repeatedly banging my two fists together.

  “I don't understand,” he signed, his face pinched in frustration. “What does thunder sound like?”

  I was desperate. I was soaked. I began to shiver. “Like a hammer,” I signed, now raising and lowering my fist, as if I were striking my opposite fist with an invisible hammer.

  My father thought about that, his face relaxing into comprehension. “Yes, like a hammer. Hard, like my hands.”

  Satisfied, he took my hand, and we ran under an awning. The meager trees along the curb bent in the wind. Leaves torn from their thin branches flew all about us.

  “I feel the wind on my face. Tell me, what is wind sound?” my father demanded.

  As I was trying to come up with an answer for my father, the black clouds blew out over the ocean. The Wonder Wheel began to turn again, the empty white cars swinging out over the boardwalk, reflecting golden sunlight.

  “Never mind,” my father signed. “We'll go to the beach before all the good spots are taken.” My mother was home with a cold that day, and my brother was
keeping her company. “Say hi to the deafies,” she had told me as we went out the door that morning. “And say hi to Ben,” she added to my father, her hands laughing.

  We were not the first to arrive at the small patch of beach that the deaf had long ago claimed as their very own, the place where they could all be together. Three deaf couples from the Bronx and one from Queens had gotten there before us. They always did, since they did not want to be relegated to the warmer, boardwalk side of the circle that would form and re-form all day long with each new arrival. We added our beach chair to the circle, which immediately expanded to accommodate us.

  All morning long the deaf streamed in from every borough in New York. Each addition to the group caused conversations to stop in midair while chairs were lifted and readjusted to enlarge the circle, after which the hands resumed their flights in midsen-tence, gesturing furiously to one another.

  I was intrigued even then by the wild diversity of language on display, the different styles reflecting a wide variety of personalities and geographic origins, as well as differences between the sexes. The men tended to sign more aggressively, more assertively than the women. The outgoing personalities signed expansively, while the shy tended to make smaller, more guarded signs. Some were so reserved that they made only the most tentative gestures in the air, constipated strings of small, stunted signs. Some signed with abandon, even boisterously, while others signed demurely. Some signed loudly, some softly. Some signed with comic exaggeration, while the signing of others was more controlled, more thoughtful. A couple who had moved to the Bronx from a small town in Georgia signed with an accent I didn't recognize. My father told me they signed with a drawl, and it was true that their signs did seem to flow from their hands like syrup, thick and slow.

  Strangely, there was one deaf lady who had suffered a stroke many years before who seemed to stutter when she signed. It was as though her signs stuck to her hands. Impatiently, she shook them off her fingers in an attempt to be understood.

  One man's signs seemed halting, primitive, even childish. My father caught me staring, with what must have been a puzzled look on my face, and explained.

  “When he was a boy, he lived on a farm. He grew up deaf on that farm. He had a big hearing family, but his family had no sign. His family was poor. It was a hard life. His father needed the boy to help with the farm work. Finally the boy went to deaf school when he was fourteen years old. There he learned sign. But it was too late. He never learned good. He is still a little deaf boy in his own mind. Now all the time he talks like a child. Simple. He never gets better. Sad.”

  My father's signs tended to be quick, impatient, insistent— typical of the signs of the deaf who live in a big city.

  Many years later I looked back on that panorama of word-pictures painted in the air above the sand of Coney Island and saw that it was as complex and as colorful in its own way as the ceiling above the Sistine Chapel.

  “Where is Sally?” one set of hands asked. (Sally was the nickname by which my mother had been known ever since her teenage days at the Lexington School for the Deaf.) Those hands belonged to Ben from Coney Island. He had been one of my mother's many boyfriends when she was a young girl.

  “She's home. My wife, Sarah, has a cold,” my father answered, carefully spelling out the name Sarah and emphasizing the word wife.

  My father hated Ben and had never gotten over my mother's long-ago interest in him.

  “Sure, he's a good-looking guy,” I observed him say one day to Mort, a close friend he'd first met at Fanwood, the deaf school they'd both been sent to as children.

  “Sure, he still has all his hair, but I bet it's dyed. And he fools around on his wife, Mary,” he added, his hands whispering in small guarded signs so no one else could see what he was signing.

  “Ah, Lou, let it go, will you?” Mort signed. “That was fifteen years ago. Who cares? You are a union man, and he's a bum!”

  “Easy for you to say,” my father answered him.

  “My wife, Sarah, says hi,” he added to Ben, while his grim face belied the pleasant greeting.

  Just then four more deaf couples arrived, lugging beach chairs and picnic baskets and beach umbrellas, their kids hanging on for dear life lest they be lost in the commotion.

  The circle readjusted to accommodate the newcomers. Down went the beach chairs and up went the hands, fluttering wildly like the wings of a flock of geese taking flight at the sound of a shotgun blast. They had not seen one another since last weekend, and there was much news to tell.

  Irwin and I with our father at Coney Island

  We kids sat on beach towels in the middle of the ever-expanding circle, like small animals in a human cage made up of our parents, beach chairs, and beach umbrellas, our protection against the possibility of getting lost. To be lost in Coney Island on a Sunday in August was a scary experience for any kid, but especially for a kid whose parents were deaf. When lost (an ever-present danger, since the beach was so crowded), the child would invariably be accosted by an adult sympathetic to the sight of a child crying his heart out, who would take him to the nearest lifeguard station. I say “him” because girls rarely wandered off and got lost in those days. There the lifeguard would ask the kid his name. Armed with that essential information, the lifeguard would dangle the kid over the railing of his elevated perch, while blowing his whistle in a series of ear-splitting screeches. In our case, of course, the whistle was useless, as the sound fell on what were literally deaf ears. We could only hope that our parents would eventually notice we were missing and maybe, just maybe, stop talking to their friends long enough to come looking for us.

  By late afternoon, when the last of the arrivals had finally made it, having traveled by ferry and subway all the way from Staten Island, there were well over one hundred beach chairs in a perfect circle. A deaf man or woman occupied each chair. And each man or woman was signing frantically to another man or woman in the circle, sometimes to one clear across the circle, far away.

  There were few secrets in the deaf community at Coney Island.

  “What do the waves sound like?” my father asked me out of the blue. “I see them crashing onto the shore. They must make a sound.”

  I was building a sand castle. The thick sand walls were water-dampened and -hardened. Three tall mud-dripped turrets stood atop a fantastic-looking structure adorned with battlements and scooped window openings. A bridge crossed a moat. And I was now sculpting small sand soldiers to guard the whole affair. I had no time to tell my father what things sounded like. I pretended I didn't see his hands.

  He shook me, not too gently. “What do the waves sound like?” he repeated.

  It was no use. Herewego again, I thought. “Loud,” I answered him without thinking. “Loud they must be,” he signed patiently, “but many things are loud. I feel loudness through the soles of my feet. But every loud thing must be loud in its own way.” He had me there.

  “Well,” I sighed while signing, my shoulders lifting to signal that I was thinking, my features arranging themselves in an expression suggesting that I was not sure of my answer but would do the best I could.

  “They sound wet when they crash down on the sand.”

  As soon as I said that, I knew my father would ask what wet sounded like. No sooner had my fingers touched my lips, and then opened and closed against my thumbs as they made the sign for wet, than my father demanded, “What kind of wet? Wet like a wild river? Wet like soft rain? Wet like sad tears?”

  I was stumped. “Wet like waves!” was all I could come up with at first. I finally signed, “Waves sound like a billion wet drops breaking apart when they smack down on the hard sand, all the tiny sounds joining to make one great sound. A wet falling ocean sound,” I added desperately.

  My father took me into his arms and held me. Letting go, he got down on his knees in the sand and signed, “That's better. I understand now.”

  Just then Mort shook my father's shoulders. “Lou! Lou! Look! Here comes Sall
y.”

  Sure enough, my mother had entered the deaf circle, holding my brother's hand. She was in her blue two-piece knitted-wool bathing suit. She wore a white rubber bathing cap with tiny yellow rubber flowers attached, covering her close-cropped black hair. She always wore her hair short in the summer. She looked beautiful. Before my mother even set down her beach chair, Ben was in her face, signing wildly like a windmill in a windstorm.

  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.