Hands of My Father: A Hearing Boy, His Deaf Parents, and the Language of Love (15 page)

My father and mother were great readers. Being deaf, they went to books as their main source of daily entertainment. Our little apartment was filled with books, books of all kinds. Some books were filled with pictures of far-off places depicting pyramids, camels, endless sand deserts, giant rivers, high waterfalls, deep canyons, strange beasts, and sailing ships. I especially loved the pictures of wooden-hulled, canvas-masted, cannonade-sided sailing vessels breaking, oaken shouldered, through giant frothy waves. And now that I had learned to read what the words under these pictures said, I had been dreaming of having a library card of my very own—a dream that was now about to be realized.

Exiting the Chinese restaurant, we made a hard right and entered an adjacent door leading to a steep flight of well-trod wooden stairs.

At the top of the stairs was a painted glass door proclaiming, “Brooklyn Public Library.” Pushing it open, my father led us into a single large room. The first thing I noticed was that it was filled, end to end, top to bottom, with
every
book that had ever been printed in the whole world. The second was that the place smelled like a Chinese restaurant. (The library was just above the restaurant kitchen.)

I could hardly believe that the hundreds of books lining the shelves were free for the asking. As a child of the Depression, I had been drilled in the sure knowledge that everything had a price.
Everything.
The idea that merely by presenting a library card—nothing more than a piece of cardboard—I would be allowed to remove these precious books seemed inconceivable.

At first I found the trust placed in me near to overwhelming. I would examine every single page of a book with the care of a brain surgeon before I would dream of checking it out. If there was even a single crease at the corner of a page—or, horrors, a food stain somewhere on the page—I would bring that blemish to the attention of the librarian. And she would note on the flyleaf, in her spidery handwriting, “Peanut butter stain? Pg. 36.” Or all too commonly, “Underlining. Pg. 12.” Even now, many decades later, I still find myself flipping through the pages of a library book, prior to checkout, to ascertain its condition.

What I found most miraculous about the library was the sheer quantity of words to be found in the seemingly endless army of books marching shoulder to shoulder, row upon row, on the shelves. Words. Words. Words. Written words. Preserved words. The library was a warehouse of words. Words to decipher. Words to learn. Words to add to my vocabulary. Words to make mine.

The words found in books were in sharp contrast to the words of my first language. Sign is a live, contemporaneous, visual-gestural language and consists of hand shapes, hand positioning, facial expressions, and body movements. Simply put, it is for me the most beautiful, immediate, and expressive of languages, because it incorporates the entire human body. In the case of sign, a picture truly is worth a thousand words. The signs of my father and mother went from their hands and faces and bodies directly into my consciousness. Thus as a child I never perceived language as a series of discrete units that added up to thoughts. Instead, I absorbed meaning whole, all at once, through my eyes.

Printed words were another matter entirely, and as I came to learn more and more of them, I discovered their unique charms. When reading a book, I could linger over every word, and sound it out in my mind for the sheer pleasure it gave me. Each word was like a musical note and could be enjoyed both for its own sake and for the sound it made as it combined with an adjoining word. Best of all was the melody I heard in a perfect sentence. This was a language of the mind; sign was a language of the heart. Sign was a beautiful painting, absorbed whole, evoking emotion along with meaning. Written language—my second language—was a language that required the brain for translation.

Reading was to become the passion of my life, our local branch of the Brooklyn Library my childhood refuge. Armed with a library card, I could escape to this quiet sanctuary anytime I became overwhelmed by the demands that my father placed on me. Here in this musty, sweet-smelling place, filled with the faint odor of soy sauce, I could open a book and be magically transported to the ends of the earth.

And so I came to spend ever-increasing amounts of time in that library, surrounded by all the words I could ever hope to learn, listening to the music of those words in my mind, all the while enveloped in the comforting scent of Chinese food.

To this day I often find myself taking an exploratory sniff at a library book, as though in expectation that a faint odor of chow mein will rise off the pages.

9

Falling in Love

I
fell in love for the first time in the second grade. Actually, I didn’t so much
fall
in love as choose, pragmatically, to
be
in love. (This would not be the case in later life, as I have been married three times in all—certainly I am more optimistic than pragmatic.)

On the first day of school I spotted a new girl in our class. Our desks were arranged alphabetically, and as I was a
U,
I sat in the rear of the room, while she, a
W,
sat at a desk to my right, immediately under a window. My earliest memory of her is the glowing halo that ringed her golden curls as a beam of sunlight fell on her head. She looked like an angel. Her small, straight nose was flecked with freckles, and completing the picture, her generous, ever-smiling mouth was filled with tiny, unbelievably white teeth.

Not until she stood up at her desk for the first time, having been called on by the teacher to read a poem, did I realize that she was much taller than me. And in all the years we traveled from grade to grade, ever upward, right into and through high school, I never caught up. She turned out to be the tallest child in our class and in every class she was ever in. Her name was Eve.

The second thing I noticed about Eve that day was her left hand. Actually, what I noted was the absence of her left hand, as she kept it in her lap the entire hour. And when she stood to read, she pushed it deep into the pocket of her tartan dress. This seemed odd to me, and awkward, as it meant that she had to hold the heavy book of poems she was reading from with only one hand.

A week of classes passed before the mystery was solved. One morning she sneezed. She was dipping her pen in the inkwell of her desk with her right hand when the sneeze overcame her, so reflexively she brought her left hand to her mouth. It was then that I saw that her left pinky curled over the adjacent finger. The pinky looked like the shepherd’s crook in a picture book I had read.

Eve saw me staring at her hand and quickly dropped it into her lap, where it lay hidden beneath her desktop. Staring straight ahead, with a fixed expression on her face, she blushed. I saw that she was embarrassed.

As the school year progressed, I noticed that the other children also became aware of Eve’s hand. Like children the world over, instinctive in their cruelty, they would stare at her hand whenever it made a rare appearance. And they would laugh at the sight of it. Eve would cringe at their stares and shrink at the sound of their laughter. She never stood straight, as she tried to minimize her height. But when her classmates laughed, she didn’t just slump; she seemed almost to hunch over. Often the laughter was not even directed at her. Kids laugh at most anything. But for Eve, every single laugh was directed at her and her misshapen hand.

Whenever I saw her distress, at some deep level of my young soul I instinctively related to what she was feeling because I had my own source of shame that, like hers, had to do with feeling different. For children, anything that marks them out as different is acutely embarrassing. In my case it was my father and mother who were different, and I was ashamed of them, in the same way that Eve was ashamed of her hand.

Once I made the connection between her embarrassment and mine, I decided to be in love with her.

It took some time, but after a while Eve became comfortable in my presence. Though she lived just around the corner from me, on West Tenth Street, in those days, at our age,
around the corner
was another world altogether. We children on West Ninth Street had no need to ever leave our block. There was absolutely nothing on West Tenth Street that was not available to me right outside our apartment house door on West Ninth Street—until I met Eve. Soon I was carrying her books home for her at the end of every school day. And I arranged to meet her at the stoop in front of her two-family house every morning before school began.

Eventually Eve introduced me to her mother. She had no father. The reason for this absence of a father was never made clear to me. And was never discussed.

After some time had passed, I asked Eve to come to my house. She agreed, and I duly introduced her to my mother. Just as she never said anything about her absent father, I had not told Eve that my mother was deaf. I didn’t know how. And somehow I knew that it wouldn’t matter to Eve.

Although surprised at my signing to my mother as I introduced her, Eve did not stare or act funny in any way. Afterward she asked me many questions: “How did you learn sign language?” “How did you communicate with your parents before you learned?” “Have they always been deaf?” “Why aren’t you deaf as well?” Her questions seemed born of genuine interest and did not embarrass me.

I had some questions of my own. “Were you born that way?” “Did you get your hand caught in a door?” “Can a doctor straighten out your pinky?” My questions did not embarrass her either.

In time she asked me to teach her some signs. As most signs require two hands to execute, she had some difficulty at first. But eventually she lost her self-consciousness in front of me and learned even the most complex ones I taught her. Using both of her hands, she would show off her signing to my mother. My mother would sign back, “Very clear. Very beautiful signs.” And I would translate my mother’s approval to Eve.

One day our teacher told the class that every morning of the following month we would begin the day with a student doing a demonstration of some kind of learning project. The project was ours to choose. Our teacher suggested some possible projects for our consideration. We could prepare a science project, for instance, involving butterflies in a jar. As she said this, every kid had the identical thought:
Butterflies in Brooklyn?
Groans of protest spread throughout the classroom. “Or possibly you could show us worms burrowing into their habitat.” But where would we find worms? Practically all of Brooklyn was paved over with concrete and macadam. More groans. “Or you could make an ant farm.” Finally, we thought, here at last was a practical suggestion. After all, we knew where to find ants on our block. But we couldn’t all present ant farms.

Having exhausted her limited repertory of ideas, our teacher gave up and said, “
Any
project will be satisfactory.” She added, “Originality, and mastery of the project, is what counts. Make it interesting. And if you wish, you may pair up and present the project jointly.”

I looked at Eve, and Eve looked at me. In unspoken agreement we agreed we would join forces to prepare and present a project. But what would the project be?

After much discussion in the lunchroom, we hit upon an idea. An excellent idea, we thought. It would be original, as the teacher insisted. It would be interesting—of that we were sure. Now all we had to do was master it; or at least Eve would have to, since we had decided to do a sign language project. We would call our project “Writing on Air.”

For the next four weeks Eve and I spent most of our spare time after school practicing signing on her front stoop. We were so energetic, we drew a crowd of fascinated neighborhood kids.

“Teach us! Teach us!” they clamored. “We want to learn your secret language.”

I, who had always been somewhat embarrassed to sign to my father on the street, now exulted in the attention my knowledge of this exotic form of communication was garnering. And so I began to show off, flaunting with exaggerated gestures some of the more complicated signs that my father had taught me. Of course the signs I enacted were basically just a vocabulary list presented for effect alone—I made no attempt to use them in context. But that didn’t seem to matter. What mattered was the complexity and dexterity of the sign itself.

My sign for
acrobat
brought down the house. My father had recently taken me to the Ringling Brothers Circus at Madison Square Garden and had taught me many circus signs. They were all new to me, as we had had no previous need for them in our Brooklyn apartment. Once I learned them, however, I found any excuse to use them. “Look, Mom,” I signed as I jumped onto my bed. “I’m an
acrobat.
” My right index and middle fingers, shaped like the legs of an acrobat, stood on my open, upturned left palm. Then the “legs” on my right hand flexed, jumped, flipped over, and executed a double somersault before descending back onto my left palm, where they stood, triumphant, slightly quivering from the impact. My sign was so good, I swear you could see the sawdust covering the circus arena of my left palm. At least I could—and my mother applauded.