Hands of My Father: A Hearing Boy, His Deaf Parents, and the Language of Love (6 page)

Although I’ve been asked a thousand times how I learned to speak, I have no clear recollection of the process of acquiring speech, that
eureka!
moment of comprehension. I can’t help but think that the radio playing constantly alongside my ear, from a time beyond memory, contributed to my brain’s cracking the code of oral speech in my otherwise silent world.

Here I’m pushing a doll in a baby carriage, while signing “
girl.”

The radio also became the Rosetta Stone for my father’s eternal quest in deciphering, and so understanding, sound. Unlike the Rosetta Stone, my radio had no visible symbols that could be, with thought and analysis, converted into language. But it did have the light that lit the dial, a dial with numbers and fractions of numbers, and an arrow that settled from time to time on certain numbers, some more often than others. And then there were the numbers that resided at each extreme end of the dial, numbers upon which the dial never settled.

My father struggled to understand how the radio worked. He removed the back and studied the many tubes of the chassis and noted how they flickered on like candles, wavered, and then burned brightly, steadily.

“Beautiful, but it’s not meant for us deaf,” his hands informed me, more resigned than sad.

And yet he was fascinated by this mechanism that was both object and process. “Is sound confined to specific sections of time and space? Is there no sound between the numbers?”

The fact that, after the dial light stayed on for a while, the whole affair grew warm to his touch, gave rise to another set of questions.

“Is sound warm?” he asked. “When the radio is cold, is there no sound coming from it? Can there be sound in the Arctic, where it is always cold? Is there sound everywhere down around the equator, where it’s hot? Is Africa a noisy place? Alaska quiet?”

When he held his hands, reverentially cupping the smooth mahogany cathedral dome of the radio, he felt rising and falling vibrations sounding off the wood. “Does sound have rhythm? Does it rise and fall like the ocean? Does sound come and go like the wind?” I struggled for years trying to come up with answers for my father, to explain the inexplicable to him.

Although my father could not hear the music coming from my radio, he could feel it through the so les of his feet. When he tired of asking me questions, he would pull my mother to him, and together they would dance to the rhythm of the music rising up from the hardwood floor, whirling in perfect harmony around my bedroom, as smoothly as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

M
y father was an adult, I a mere child, but as he could neither hear nor speak comprehensibly in the hearing world outside our silent apartment, I became his designated ears and mouth. This began when I was still a little boy, not more than five or six. One day he took me to the poultry shop at the corner of our block, where the chickens hung from the hooks in the ceiling, their blind eyes looking down at the sawdust-covered floor. My father’s hands began to move.

“Tell Mr. Herman we want a fat chicken today,” he signed, two fingers moving up and down like the beak of a pecking bird. Some of his signs were so real, they made me laugh. He laughed right along with me and would then exaggerate the sign. Soon everybody around us would be laughing also. When I was older, I realized they had been laughing at us, not with us.

Our next stop was the vegetable stand.

“Mother Sarah loves corn,” he signed, his fingers scraping imaginary kernels from an imaginary corncob. “But it must be fresh. Absolutely fresh.” My job was to select the yellowest ears with the juiciest kernels, the plumpest of red tomatoes, the heaviest potatoes, and the crispest heads of lettuce.

“Good,” he signed, thumbs up. “These are perfect.” My father always said that, even the time a fat worm crawled out of a tomato I had selected with such care.

“Only a perfect tomato like this one,” he signed, “would attract such a perfect worm.”

Out on the street my father’s hands told me, “Tomorrow we will go to the zoo.”

Magically his hands turned into animals. Slowly they swayed like an elephant’s trunk. Fingers curled, they scratched his side like a monkey. Lightly they brushed his nose like a mouse twitching his whiskers. And his thumb peeked out from beneath the shell of his hand like a turtle’s head. As I watched, my father’s hands shaped the air, and I saw a zoo filled with flying birds, slithering snakes, snapping alligators, and sleek swimming seals.

People stopped and looked at us. I looked only at my father’s hands, imagining the fun we would have and the sights we would see.

Walking home, we passed a man sitting on the curb. “I’m hungry,” he whispered.

The man was old. His clothes were dirty. I didn’t want to stop.

“What did the man say?” my father asked.

“He’s hungry,” I answered.

My father reached into our paper bags and pulled out some apples and a loaf of bread to give to the man.

“Tell him I’m sorry.” With his fist he circled his heart. “But tell him things are bound to get better.” Then he took my hand, and we continued down the street.

When we arrived back home, my mother was waiting by our apartment door. My father smiled, put down the paper bags, waved his arms in an excited greeting, and gathered her in his arms. There was room for me as well.

W
hen I was a small child, interpreting for my father while shopping in the chicken store and vegetable market made me feel important. However, even though my role as interpreter was a source of pride, it often left me feeling confused. Here I was, mouthing the adult words and concepts of my father, an adult, to another adult. But I was not an adult. I was a six-year-old child. And in those bygone times in Brooklyn, the role of a child was quite clear. Children were spoken
to.
They were constantly being told what to do and how to act: “Do this.” “Do that.” “Come here.” “Go there.” And most embarrassingly, as if kids were dogs, “
Sit.
” The only order that was missing from parents’ lexicon of commands was “Heel.”

A kid’s life was one of commands. There was no room for discussion between child and parent. Whine? Yes. Up to a point. Discuss? No. Never.

But unlike my friends, who unthinkingly knew their place in the scheme of things, I had a dual role. Their fathers could hear and thus did not depend on them for anything; mine could not. And when he was forced to interact with the hearing, my father was placed in the position of a child—ignored or dismissed. At those times my father expected me to transform myself instantly into an adult, one who was capable of communicating on his behalf, adult to adult.

At the 1939 World’s Fair, looking very crabby because I’ve had to translate for my father all day.

Mastering this unique trick of two-way communication—sound to sign, sign to sound—put me in an odd, unnatural position relative to my father. In a complete reversal of normal status, my deaf father was dependent on his hearing child.

Further compounding my confusion, in my guise as presumptive adult I often felt invisible. My father had programmed me to be a mere conduit for communication when I was interpreting for him: he spoke not
to
me but
through
me, like a pane of glass.

Dizzying as all that was, the moment my father did not need my trick, the roles were suddenly flipped around, and once again I was the child.

These polarizing reversals, so sudden and complete, were unnerving for me. One minute I was struggling with comprehending and deciphering, then translating and interpreting the adult concepts that had been communicated to me by hearing grownups. The very next minute my father was ordering me to be still, to stop jumping around, and to stop fidgeting—and telling me that a boy must always mind his father. Then he would gently but firmly take my small hand in his, and we would walk away from the hearing world, and I would be once again just what I was, his little boy.

A
s I grew older, my job as interpreter increased in complexity, and so did my feelings about it. My father continued to take me with him every Saturday morning to do the week’s shopping, and I still felt a sense of pride about his reliance on me. But in time I became increasingly sensitive to the harsh reality of the prejudice and scorn that the hearing world levied at my deaf father.

Older still, as I deepened into the role of being my father’s voice, I would note with despair and shame, and then anger, the way in which the hearing would ignore him as if he were nothing more than an inanimate, insensate block of stone, something not quite human. This sheer indifference seemed even worse than contempt.

On many occasions I witnessed a hearing stranger approach my father on the street and ask him a question: “Can you tell me the way to the subway?” “What time is it?” “Where is the closest bakery?”

I was never able to get used to the initial look of incomprehension that bloomed on the stranger’s face when my father failed to answer, and the way that look turned to shock at the sound of his harsh voice announcing his deafness, then metastasized into revulsion, at which point the stranger would turn and flee as if my father’s deafness were a contagious disease.

Even now, seventy long years in the future, the memory of the shame I sometimes felt as a child is as corrosive as battery acid in my veins, and bile rises unbidden in my throat.

One day we were in the local butcher shop. As usual on a Saturday, it was crowded. My father told me to ask the butcher for five pounds of rib roast. “Tell the butcher man, no fat!” he added firmly.

“My father wants five pounds of rib roast. No fat,” I said to the butcher when we got to the head of the line.

“I’m busy, kid,” he said, not even bothering to look at my father.

“Tell him you’ll have to wait your turn.”

“What did he say?” my father asked me.

“He said we have to wait our turn.”

“But it
is
our turn. Tell the man to wait on us. Now!”

“My father says it’s our turn now. He would like a five-pound rib roast, and no fat.”

I added politely, “Please, mister.”

“Tell the
dummy
I’ll say when it’s his turn. Now get to the back of the line, or get the hell out of my store.”