Hands of My Father

by Myron Uhlberg

  If any neighbors had happened to glance out their rear windows, they would have seen a kid with a clothesline wound in coils around his waist, dangling from the telephone wires, with a determined expression of absolute concentration on his face. Yes, I was the king of my jungle. Fortunately, no one saw me—or reported me to my parents, as they would certainly have done if they had—and I was able to perform this feat several days in a row until, tiring of the rather restricted movements available to me on the single telephone line running up and down the “rooftop” of my jungle, I returned to my ample collection of Tarzan comic books to investigate possibilities for further adventures.

  Using the amazing powers of deduction with which all Brooklyn kids were genetically endowed to enable them to transform their environment into something more exotic, I hit on the idea that the brick face of my apartment house was the sheer face of a jungle escarpment. Of course, I didn't know what an escarpment was, but when I looked upward at the wall, indelibly etched in my mind was the image of Tarzan climbing a sheer cliff face, followed closely by a lion. Holding that image in my mind, I imagined a lion on West Ninth Street stealthily stalking me.

  And so it was that one day I found myself clinging to the face of my apartment house wall, like a spider on steroids, fingers and sneaker-toes embedded between the bricks, two stories above the ground. It was slow going, but brick by brick I proceeded upward, the hot breath of the lion warming my feet, its deep cough throbbing in my ear.

  Ignoring the real-life screams of the neighborhood mothers rising from the street below me, I crawled up and up, mindful of the fire escape railings just inches to my right. My fail-safe plan was to grab the rail of a handy fire escape if I should begin to fall.

  Just at the moment I was sure I had escaped the lion, Mrs. Abromovitz emerged from her bedroom window, rags in hand, to perform her once-a-week window-cleaning ritual. Settling her ample rump comfortably on the windowsill, she lowered the overhead window onto her lap for security, turned, and saw me clinging to the wall, inches from her face. Her single scream put to shame the collective yells from the gaggle of neighborhood yentas below. Theirs were but a murmuring breeze, split by the thunder of her voice.

  The lowered window kept her nailed to the windowsill, as she sat stunned in fright.

  I froze, stuck to the face of the building, paralyzed by the sound. Regaining my wits, I knew I had to get out of there quickly. But up or down? Down below waited my imaginary foul-breathed lion and the outraged yentas—infinitely more fearsome predators—so up I went, up to our apartment's third-floor fire escape.

  As my mother was deaf, she did not hear me climb through her bedroom window. And since I had my own key to our apartment, she did not know that I had entered it from the fire escape. Not for the first time I realized that for a kid like me, having deaf parents had some practical advantages.

  But I knew there would be a reckoning.

  That evening, when my father came home from work, three of our neighbors were stationed at our front door. They had all written down their fervid accounts of my escapade, and now they jabbed the resulting narratives in my father's weary face.

  Mrs. Abromovitz had yet to emerge from her apartment. Her meek husband was faithfully attending to her as she lay in her bed, to which she had immediately retired upon regaining her senses.

  My father and I had a most interesting conversation that evening, a conversation that taxed to the utmost my signing comprehension. But, as ever, my father's expressive use of his beloved language left no doubt in my mind what lay in store for me should I ever again attempt a similar stunt.

  The lion was not seen or heard from again on our block. The fearsome sounds of those yentas no doubt drove him back to Africa.

  15

  A Boy in Uniform

  Every night after dinner, while my mother was doing the evening dishes, my father sat at the kitchen table with my brother and me and read to us—in sign—from the first page of the New York Daily News, which his labors in the composing room had helped to create. In its early years World War II was going badly. We were losing on every front, one battle after another. “Don't worry,” his hands told Irwin and me with perfect conviction, “America has never lost a war.”

  I could read most of the words on the front page for myself. Even the ones I didn't know, I could sound out. But I much preferred that my father read the front page to me. Words like war, and battles, and army, and shell, and bomb were just words to me, as were wounded and dead. But when my father's expressive hands turned these words into sign, they came alive. In the movement of his hands, I could see the fall of bombs, the flight of shells, and the movements of vast armies; I could hear the cries of the wounded and the stillness of death. His hands told me of the Bataan Death March, and I could see our weary soldiers dragging their broken bodies along the endless dusty roads, and I could feel the jabs of bayonet points as their cruel Japanese guards prodded them. I could see the shells erupting on the decks of battleships at the Battle of Midway, the fires and explosions bursting into the air, the sailors abandoning ship as jagged holes appeared atthewaterline, and the oil-stained sea becoming clotted with sailors clinging to floating debris. My brother would sit at his side of the table, too young to comprehend what all the excitement was about, but fascinated by the dramatic signs and thrilled by every minute of the performance.

  I had a vivid imagination as a young boy and could readily turn words into images in my mind. But the constant commerce between words and signs that was so much a part of my life greatly expanded this ability.

  The evening readings with my father were the high point of my day, and I became a great student of the war. My friends would have to wait for the Pathé newsreel that was shown every Saturday afternoon on the silver screen at our local movie house for a visual chronicle of the progress of the war. I, on the other hand, could watch it every night of the week on the human screen of my father's hands.

  In 1944 the tide of war was turning in our favor. We were on the march. I thrilled to my father's signs every night, as he read to me the headlines that trumpeted the advances our soldiers were making up the boot of Italy.

  In June Rome was liberated.

  That same month the Allies landed on the beaches of Normandy. D-Day had finally arrived. Slowly but surely our troops were slogging their way to Paris.

  The newspaper was filled with pictures of soldiers in uniform; soldiers in foxholes; soldiers in chow lines; soldiers at the front; and even dead soldiers. All wore uniforms of one kind or another, theirs and ours.

  I wanted a uniform of my own.

  My mother's youngest brother, Milton, was a captain in the army, a paratrooper posted somewhere in Europe, and then in Burma. He sent me a bayonet holder and a bandolier. I wore them around the apartment.

  Harry (left) and my mother's youngest brother, Milton (above)

  Harry, another of my mother's brothers, was a sailor on a battleship somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. He sent me a sailor's hat. It was spanking white and broken in quite nicely, with creases in all the right places, and I liked to wear it tilted over one eye at a rakish angle. With my sailor hat on my head, I marched around our apartment, walking splayfooted as I imagined my uncle did when manning the deck at the height of a storm in the Pacific, the waves crashing over the bow, roller upon roller.

  Our apartment was small. I was constantly underfoot. And as my mother liked to wash and wax the kitchen floor every day— hourly, it seemed to me—she often chased me out of the apartment and into our third-floor hallway. My brother, however, had to remain inside with her, ever close, where she could keep an eye on him.

  Soon the older kids in the building, all wearing scraps of a uniform—an odd hat here, a cracked leather belt there—joined me. We stomped up and down the marble-floored hallways and clattered up and down the metal stairways, singing:

  “You're in the Army now. You're not behind the plow. You'll never get rich by digging a ditch. You're in the Army now.�
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  Our combined voices echoed through the halls and up and down the stairwells, until angry neighbors flung open the door of every apartment and shouted at us to shut up!, threatening to give chase if we didn't.

  To escape the enemy, we ran to the elevator and took it to the basement. As soon as the door opened and we tumbled out, we went running through the musty darkness alongside the dim chicken-wire storage rooms and the ever-glowing open mouth of the malevolent monster of a furnace. Bursting out the cellar door, we exited into the alley, once again safe to march and fight another day.

  Exhausted but exhilarated, I would retreat to our apartment, where I would let Irwin wear my military equipment, while I tutored him in marching and singing military songs. This attention I paid to my brother pleased my mother, but she still drew the line at our marching on her newly waxed kitchen floor.

  My longing for a uniform—and for some kind of outlet for my youthful energies—caught my father's attention. As the Allies took Paris in August, my father came home holding a large, long box under his arm. Placing it with great authority in my hands, he commanded me to open it. Inside the box was a brand-new, sharply creased Boy Scout uniform, complete with regulation belt, knee-high socks, pleated scarf, and lanyard.

  “This is a uniform for you. And your black Thorn McAn shoes,” he signed, “with a good shine on them, will be perfect.”

  I did not know a single kid in all of Brooklyn who was a Boy Scout. There must be a reason no one is in the Scouts, I thought as I held the box in my arms.

  While I stood there, my father marched (there is no other word for it) into his bedroom and returned, still marching, with a silver-framed picture of himself, taken when he was a boy. The picture showed him dressed in his deaf-school military uniform, peaked cap and all. The photo was dated 1912. He looked exactly like one of the Union drummer boys in the Civil War pictures that were in our history books at school.

  My father at Fanwood School for the Deaf 1912

  “You're just the same as I was when I was your age,” he signed to me, emphasizing the sign for same. “I was easily bored, just like you. Left to myself, I would get into trouble of one kind or another. After all, I had no one to talk to. No one in my family knew sign. The kids on my block did not know sign. I was on my own. However, that all changed when I went to Fanwood, my deaf residential school. It was patterned after a military academy and was run like a miniature version of West Point. We wore uniforms and marched constantly: from class to class, from class to dining hall, from dining hall to gymnasium, from gymnasium to playing fields, and virtually from pisspot to pisspot.”

  I had to ask him to explain his sign for pisspot. His two hands pointed downward, one in front of the other, pivoting at the wrists. I understood immediately. Then they moved back and forth—marching—his dangling fingers indicating the rows upon rows of marchers, stepping out in unison and in perfect harmony. Watching his hands, I was hypnotized; I could see my father and his schoolmates, rank upon rank, marching, marching, marching.

  “You can't imagine what a good marcher I became, although at the time I saw no practical use in the Bronx for this odd skill. Unless you count marching in my dreams as a skill.” He smiled at the thought.

  And then like a cloudburst, my father's face suddenly darkened. “Later, I came to understand why the school placed so much emphasis on us deaf kids being disciplined. Our hearing teachers thought that being deaf, we would be uncontrollable if left to ourselves, like animals in the wild. So, their thinking went, we had to be disciplined—we had to be taught, basically, to obey orders. But that's another story.”

  Taking me by the hand, we marched into my bedroom, where my father watched as I put on my spanking-new, sharply creased Boy Scout uniform. Now what? I wondered.

  As if reading my mind, my father signed, “The Boy Scouts are not big on marching. But discipline and obedience are important. And you could use a healthy dose of both. But don't worry, it's not all about that. You'll learn things as well. And for every new subject you master, you'll get a merit badge. I'll help you with that.”

  The first meeting was to be held in the basement of our scout leader's home, on the other side of Seth Low Park. Although it was just four blocks away, it might as well have been on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. I was not in the habit of wandering far from my block.

  For my first meeting my father accompanied me, waiting outside until it ended after a couple of hours. I had never been so bored in my life. All we did at that first den meeting was repeat, over and over again, the Boy Scout oath.

  Subsequent meetings seemed to be no improvement. If anything they were worse because my father ceased to accompany me, which meant that every time I ventured out in my ridiculously elaborate blue uniform, the bullies in the neighborhood chased after me, making fun of me. But my father remained enthusiastic. He'd consulted the “merit badge” section of the Boy Scout manual and was determined that I should earn one.

  So one night after supper I found myself at the kitchen table, sorting through about a million assorted postage stamps, spilled from a plastic bag that my father had bought in a philatelic shop in the city. Staring up at me were assorted strange-looking faces, covered in various styles of facial hair—spade whiskers, waxy curled mustaches, even muttonchops—and an equally exotic assortment of strange beasts, all printed in brilliant colors.

  In the exact middle of the table sat a new stamp book, open to the first, blank page, which seemed to dare me to fill it, so as to one day earn my very first merit badge: “Stamp Collecting. MB [merit badge] No. 108.”

  My father put on his printer's visor, shielding his eyes from the kitchen light, and delicately selected a single stamp from the jumbled pile. Holding it carefully by the edge, he placed it in front of me, handed me a shovel-headed pair of tweezers and a hinge, and instructed me to mount the stamp in the appropriate-size box on the blank page of the stamp album.

  I grasped the stamp with the sharp tweezers and pressed it onto the glued hinge—and in so doing, tore the whiskered face in half.

  My father groaned. “Gently, softly.” My father's hands gently, softly, and ever so slowly squeezed an invisible object.

  I tried again. This effort produced an interesting crease in the otherwise curled horns of an antelope, creating the illusion that they grew out of the poor animal's tail.

  In desperation, not waiting for my father's comment, I grabbed yet another of the pristine colored bits of paper and gently, softly, placed it squarely on the hinge in the dead center of a box. I paused, letting the glue dry and so adhere to page and stamp.

  Satisfied that I had at last brought the process to a successful conclusion, I gently, softly, removed the tweezers—taking the entire perimeter of the stamp, now glued to the tweezers, along with it, and leaving the heart of the stamp defiantly glued to the hinge on the page.

  Looking up, I saw my father's eyes cross, and his lips compress in anguish. His expressive hands lay silenced on top of his head. He had nothing to say.

  I dug into that pile of stamps frantically, desperately, time and time again, with pretty much the same results.

  Finally my father stilled my hands in his. “I have another idea,” he signed.

  The following week he brought home a set of X-Acto knife carving tools. Three knives were housed in individual black cushioned recesses in the bottom of a blond wood case. An assortment of extremely sharp-looking blades, of various sizes and shapes, were held in place by felt loops on the inside of the brass-hinged lid. The lid had an ornate brass latch that fit precisely into a matching brass catch. The whole affair was a wonder to my eyes. It was magnificent. But what in the world was it for? I wondered.

  “MB No. 118. Wood Carving,” my father signed to me, with an optimism I was sure was misguided.

  That evening we sat, my father, brother, and I, where we always sat when there was a project at hand—at the kitchen table. And as usual my mother was doing the dinner dishes, her back turne
d to us, but a definite smile on her face; a smile that threatened, I thought, to break into a belly laugh.

  The X-Acto knife set sat squarely in the middle of the table, on a sheet of the day's newspaper. Alongside the open case were three bars of Ivory soap.

  “We'll break in these knives by carving the bars of soap. That way we won't dull the blades, and you'll get practice in carving.”

  That made sense to me, and picking up one of the knives, I proceeded to slice a bar of soap neatly in two, along with the web of skin between my thumb and forefinger.

  My brother, who had been eyeing the box of blades enviously, left the table in a precipitous rush at the sight of the blood spurting from my hand. He was always complaining to my father that I always got new things first, never shared them, and passed them on to him only when they got old and worn or even broken. But this time he lost interest in my latest acquisition almost immediately.

  Once the flow of blood was stemmed and the cut was bandaged, we tried again.

  “Gently, softly,” my father signed. I was frankly getting tired of these signs.

  But slowly, gently, softly, I learned to use the knives and succeeded in carving out of the soft, yielding soap an approximation of an antelope. Sure, it looked as if its horns were growing out of its tail—actually, it looked remarkably like the stamp I had mangled. But what the heck, it wasn't half bad. Í can do this, I thought.

  “Practice,” my father signed. I did. Every afternoon I carved an animal from a bar of soap, some strictly from my imagination, and every evening I would display the result to my mother and father, as my brother stared skeptically at my latest effort.