Hands of My Father: A Hearing Boy, His Deaf Parents, and the Language of Love (11 page)

It took quite some time that night to disassemble the tracks and store the trains under my bed.

The next day my father came home with another large box under his arm. He put on striped-gray engineer’s overalls and adjusted his engineer’s cap.

Sitting on the floor, he signed, “ALL ABOARD!” and sent the Blue Comet, the Pennsylvania Flyer, and the new Allegheny Express rushing after one another,
clickety-clack, clickety-clack,
down the tracks curled around my bedroom floor.

On Saturday my father brought home large panels of plywood and assorted packages in all shapes and sizes. He put his big saw and all his tools in my bedroom, closing the door behind him. On the door he had hung a Do Not Disturb sign. “This means YOU,” he boldly wrote across the sign. “Son Myron,” he added at the bottom, for perfect clarity.

That night he stood with me at my closed bedroom door.

“Close your eyes,” his hands commanded.

I did, and seconds later when he told me to open them again, I saw that my bedroom was now filled with a huge table. To make room, my father had pushed both my bed and my brother’s bed against the far wall. On the table there were train tracks going every which way, up and down, in and out, over and under, twisting and curving. Waiting on the track sat three locomotives, blue, red, and black. Coal cars, tenders, passenger cars, freight cars, flatcars, and three cabooses. A lone Heinz Pickle boxcar trailed behind them.

There were tunnels, bridges, houses, and stations. There were grass-covered hills over which miniature cows and a flock of tiny white sheep grazed. Between the hills rushed rivers and streams made of glass, telephone poles fashioned from pencils, and fences made of toothpicks. Toy cars sat in arrested motion on blacktopped roads lined with perfect little streetlamps.

And everywhere I looked there were little people, frozen in midmotion. My father was good with his hands. He spoke with his hands in more ways than one.

As I stood there by his side, gazing in astonished wonder at the scene spread out before me, he turned off the ceiling light and went to the control panel he had built into the exact center of the table. Suddenly the table burst into light. Every tiny bulb behind every wax-paper window in every miniature house blazed on; all the perfect little streetlamps sprinkled perfect specks of light on the black road below; the signals at track crossings began to insistently blink yellow, then red; bridges wore necklaces trimmed in light, and the train sheds, no longer dark, displayed their illuminated cardboard nooks and crannies.

As I stared, my hands forgotten at my sides, unable to sign a single word, my father put the engineer’s cap on my head, signing, “You take over, chief. Happy birthday!”

I don’t think I slept a wink that night. And I never for a moment thought of taking off my engineer’s cap.

When my brother turned four, among his many presents was a smaller version of my engineer’s hat. Up until then I had strictly forbidden him to touch the control panel. “Look. DON’T TOUCH!” was my constant admonition. But now that he had his own engineer’s cap, I magnanimously allowed him to control the magnetic derrick that offloaded the freight cars. I soon regretted this gesture, as from then on he insisted I stop the trains every time they passed the derrick.

As I grew older, I lost interest in my trains, and my brother took over. It thrilled him to run the three sets of trains simultaneously at excessive speeds, until they jumped the track—much to my father’s consternation.

Eventually Irwin also lost interest in the train set. And one day my father dismantled the whole project and sent it off to a younger cousin of ours—along with my engineer’s hat.

5

Heaven

A
lthough I could not help but resent my brother’s dependence on me, I was also ashamed of my feelings. I knew guilt at an age when most children have no sense of such an emotion. When this toxic brew would overcome me, I often sought to escape to the one place where I could be truly alone—the roof of our apartment building.

The roof was my personal heaven, my sanctuary. On a summer’s day I would sit in solitary silence, my back to the low warm brick wall that edged the roof, with nothing but blue sky above my head. On that roof, on such a day, my ears were not filled with the incessant sounds of my Brooklyn block; nor were my eyes filled to overflowing with the incessant signs of my father, or the image of my brother suddenly stiffening and dropping to the ground.

On the roof I would read every copy of my extensive comic book collection, over and over again. I would get lost in the adventures recounted in these stories—the close calls, the speeding trains, the angry lions, the nefarious crooks—and dream I was a normal kid.

T
he roof wasn’t just my own, of course; it was communal property. On summer evenings the neighbors would gather there to cool off, sitting in family groups on blankets spread over the graveled tarpaper, covered edge to edge with cold chicken, beer, lemonade, potato salad, cakes, and cookies. We kids would migrate from blanket to blanket, begging a cookie or a drumstick, for no other reason than to see if somebody else’s food tasted any different from our mother’s efforts.

Tuesday nights in summer were special. As the sky darkened over Coney Island, fireworks were shot up into the sky over the Atlantic, where they burst into incandescent blooms of light against the purpled horizon. On rooftops all over Bensonhurst, collective
OOOHHHHs
and
AAAHHHHs
rose to the heavens, in a chorus of appreciation. For once my father’s deaf voice blended into the rest and was unremarked upon. And my little brother sat mercifully still, watching with open mouth and glazed eyes, nodding in time with the exploding of each new pyrotechnic display.

O
n one side of the roof was Frankie’s pigeon coop. Behind the chicken wire, sitting shoulder to shoulder on doweled roosts, were hundreds of gray pigeons, all facing in the same direction.

I would hide behind the brick chimney when I heard Frankie open the heavy metal roof door. And from there, unseen, I would watch him talk to his pigeons for hours. Frankie was not dumb, but he talked baby talk to those birds. They seemed to like it, so who was I to object? Besides, I knew sign language, not pigeon language. Maybe Frankie’s words were making sense to the birds. They sure seemed to be listening.

After a while he opened the cage door, and with a long bamboo pole he shooed the birds off their roost and into the air. They flew as one, like a gray cloud, up, up into the blue sky over our roof, shedding a mist of slowly falling feathers in their wake, leaving their white calling cards on the black macadam below.

With the bamboo pole Frankie waved the flock into ever-expanding circles, extending over Avenue P and Kings Highway.

Not content with that feat of magic, he waved the pole ever more vigorously, until the pigeons wheeled out of sight.

The first time I ever watched this happen, I thought, the big show-off, now he’s lost his pigeons. Now who will he have to talk his baby talk to?
Not me!
Just as I thought those pigeons must surely be flying over the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey, and from there to California, Frankie stamped the end of his pole on the roof, and miraculously they reappeared in the Brooklyn sky. In ever-diminishing circles they returned to our roof, where in a graceful fall, single file, they reentered the coop.

Frankie closed the cage door and told them in his pigeon language that they were beautiful. They sat, pigeon feet clinging to their perch, bobbing their heads in total agreement.

When the weather was clear, I would go to my roof with my official enemy plane-spotter cards and my father’s binoculars. Kneeling behind the brick outer wall, so as not to be seen by the enemy pilots, I would look out over Coney Island. That’s the direction the German planes would come from. Why they would come to Brooklyn was a question that never entered my mind. Perhaps to bomb Nathan’s Famous, whose food sustained the morale of every citizen of Brooklyn. The loss of their franks and buttered corn would be a near-mortal blow.

Those German planes never came. They must have known from enemy intelligence that I was on guard, ever vigilant, protecting Brooklyn.

M
y roof was not just a summer place.

In the winter, after a heavy snowfall, when the rest of the kids ran down into the street, I would go in the other direction. Pushing the roof door open against the piled-up snow was a challenge. But once accomplished, I had the roof all to myself. I would spend hours trekking through the accumulation of snow, my footprints the only ones disturbing its smooth surface.

When enough snow had fallen, I made enormous snowballs. They were cannonball size. Then bomb size. These I proceeded to lob over the wall onto the unsuspecting neighbors below. I was not the bombardier of a B-17 Flying Fortress, and I had no Norden bombsight, but my accuracy was positively uncanny.

6

Clothes Make the Boy