Hands of My Father: A Hearing Boy, His Deaf Parents, and the Language of Love (25 page)

16

Brooklyn Bully

F
reddy was the bully of our block and the bane of my existence. He was the angriest kid in our neighborhood, maybe the angriest kid in all of Brooklyn. He was mad from sunup to sundown. Every kid in the neighborhood was his natural enemy. We sometimes wondered about this. What the heck was Freddy so angry about? What did we ever do to him?

If not for my speed, Freddy would have caught me during our weekly early-evening footraces across the grass and down the pathways of Seth Low Park, in the brief period when my father was still making me go to Boy Scout meetings. With the hated yellow scarf flying over my shoulder as he gained on me, I wished I were four inches taller and thirty pounds heavier. But I wasn’t, and with that knowledge I increased my speed a notch, leaving him, gasping, behind. Safe again!

Freddy’s goal, thus far unrealized, was to come upon me unawares and administer his infamous “Indian burn.” Whenever Freddy caught a kid, always one smaller than himself, he would grab the boy’s arm in his ham-hock hands, at its most tender part, and then twist, so that each fat hand went in the opposite direction from the other. The result was always the same: a mighty howl of pain from the unfortunate boy and a forearm as red as if it had been exposed to a Bunsen burner.

If the Indian burn failed to motivate the boy to sue for peace, Freddy administered his knuckle rap: a short, sharp
pang
on the head with his pointed knuckle, which was, unlike his hand, fat free and thus quite pointy. For the unfortunate boy who had a crewcut, this procedure raised an interestingly shaped knot on his head, often the size of an egg. Such was the outcome of Freddy catching you.

As I was the only kid on our block who had so far escaped Freddy’s ministrations, I held a special place in his malignant heart. He could not catch me, as I easily outran him. And when trapped, as in an alley, I was agile enough that I could squirm my way to safety. This drove him crazy. Especially when, just out of his reach, I would laugh and taunt him. This proved to be my undoing.

Freddy was not a stupid boy. He was a bit fat and clumsy perhaps, and slow-footed for sure, but he was not slow-witted. I could outrun him, but there was always the possibility that he could outthink me. Freddy developed a plan—a plan to silence my jeering insults and end my humiliating escapes, perhaps forever.

The tar-paper roof of our apartment house, accessed through a heavy metal door, was my private park, as I’ve said, the one place on our busy Brooklyn block where I could go and be completely by myself. I had obtained a copy of the primitive key that secured the door. It was my most precious possession. With it I could remove myself from the incessant noise and activity that permeated my block. I could sit, my back to the low perimeter of the brick roof wall, and read a book, or wonder about my life, or just look at the clouds sailing by in the blue sky over Brooklyn. And from my roof, on a really clear day, I could catch glimpses of the Atlantic Ocean reflecting the early-morning light, lying off Coney Island, just a few miles away.

Needless to say, I sometimes let my guard down during these reveries, and one fateful afternoon that almost led to my undoing.

Unbeknownst to me, Freddy had studied my movements over the course of a typical week, the better to plan my eventual capture. Having made careful note of my sudden and inexplicable disappearances, he followed silently behind as I took myself to the roof one day.

Usually I used my secret key to relock the metal roof door behind me as soon as I got there. But on this particular afternoon, in my haste to read a new book, I forgot.

Deeply engrossed in the predicament of the main character, I failed to hear Freddy creeping up on me. When I finally heard his sneakered feet sliding over the graveled roof, it was almost too late.

Leaping to my feet, I threw my book at his head and ran past him, as he reflexively ducked. It was a thick book. It contained many chapters, many adventures. Had I been reading a thin, in-substantial comic book, my fate would have been sealed.

But my reprieve was brief. I dashed to the roof door, only to discover that Freddy had jammed it shut. I then ran, like a demented rat in a maze, all around the roof. Through and around the sheets hanging from the clotheslines on the roof, around the twin chimney stacks, and around the many protruding air vents that jutted up from the roof, I raced, with Freddy in close pursuit.

Slowly but surely Freddy herded me into a corner. I was trapped.

The next thing I knew, I was dangling, head down, held only by my ankles, over the edge of the roof.

Strangely, I was not afraid. Instead I was fascinated, in an odd way, to observe the ground six floors below my head. I had, literally, a bird’s-eye view of the clotheslines extending from each apartment window. Now, I thought, if Freddy were to let me go, I would bounce off the clotheslines, as a steel ball bounces off the many bumpers on a pinball machine before ending its journey—in the slot at the bottom of the machine—without a scratch.

I couldn’t help wondering where I would end up if dropped. But since I was not a steel ball and was unlikely to end without a scratch, I dismissed
that
question from my mind.

As I had a wonderful imagination, a new image, unbidden, came clearly to mind: on the way down I would be trapped in one of the giant brassieres hanging from Mrs. Abromovitz’s line.

It’s remarkable how your imminent demise so sharply focuses your mind. I could visualize in acute detail the shocked look on Mrs. Abromovitz’s face as she unsuspectingly reeled me in along with the rest of her wash. The image so amused me that I burst into laughter.

This laugh was to be my salvation. Hearing me, Freddy thought that he had failed to scare the wits out of me. Never having actually intended to drop me (I hoped), he pulled me back onto the roof.

Thereafter Freddy never bothered me again. He had done his worst, and I had laughed in his face. He had never before encountered such bravery. I had passed some insane test that only he could devise. I was the envy of every kid on the block.

17

Polio

N
ineteen forty-five was the height of the polio scare in America. And so it was that every mother in Brooklyn forced down her children’s throats a daily dose of cod-liver oil. The sickening, vile, thick, oily, fishy-smelling liquid clung to our lips, coated our tongues, and lined our throats for hours. It was impossible to get rid of the taste. We resigned ourselves to the fact that it just had to wear off by itself, in its own sweet time.

“It’s good for you,” my mother signed, in exasperation at our daily struggle; often, she literally had to force my mouth open for my daily dose. I hated most fish, and I despised cod-liver oil, the deadliest by-product of fish ever devised by man—pure distilled evil, as far as I was concerned.

My brother, on the other hand, was used to taking medicine every day to control his seizures and not only took it without complaint but may even have liked it.

“It hurts me more than it does you,” my mother signed after our daily dose had been administered.

Then came the killer ending to any argument: “Do you want to get polio?”

We Brooklyn boys and girls heard about polio what seemed like every day of our lives, especially in the summertime. For us kids, summer was the golden time, wonderful carefree days blending seamlessly one into the other. But for our parents it was another matter entirely: “Don’t get overheated. Do you want to get polio?” (This was invariably followed by “That’s what happened to President Roosevelt when he was a young man. Do you want to sit in a wheelchair for the rest of your life like him?”) “Don’t go in the water right after eating. You’ll get a cramp and die. And if not, you’ll get polio.” “Stay away from crowds. You’ll get polio.” “Don’t get dirty. You’ll get polio.” “You can’t go to the movies this Saturday. Some kid on the next block got polio.” “Don’t drink at the public fountain. You’ll get polio.” “Don’t eat food if a fly lands on it. You’ll get polio.”
Don’t do this, don’t do that.
And then the dreaded final words: “Do you want to end up in an iron lung?”

Because she wanted to emphasize that this was a matter that went beyond her daily and wide-ranging litany of prohibitions, my mother employed not the usual one but two signs for
don’t.
She used the everyday, utilitarian
don’t
that she employed for any number of ordinary occasions, whenever I was doing something she preferred me not to be doing—the quick flick of her thumb from under her chin. And then, to leave no room for doubt or argument, she used the special
don’t
with crossed hands, palms facing me, which she would repeatedly separate and recross, all the while looking at me with the sternest expression she could muster.

She would keep it up until I acknowledged her warnings to her satisfaction—not with a simple nod of my head or a shake of my hinged fist in the sign for
yes,
but with an emphatically finger-spelled “Okay! Okay!…OKAY, ALREADY!”

And if I ever, heaven forbid, had a sniffle, or a stomachache, she put me to bed immediately; and until the sniffle or the stomachache was gone, and I had convinced her that it was, she hovered over me, like a soft enveloping cloud.

My brother was even more closely monitored. Whenever there was a reported outbreak of polio, she would keep him indoors, always at her side, so that there wasn’t even the slightest chance of his being exposed to polio—or any other germ, for that matter.

No one knew how a person got polio; our doctor didn’t, the scientists didn’t, our teachers didn’t, and our parents didn’t. Even Mrs. Birnbaum, who spied on the entire block while leaning out of her bedroom window all day long with her fat arms resting on a pillow, didn’t, and she knew
everything.
But our parents seemed convinced that heat was a great incubator of the polio germ, and they viewed the long golden days of summer with particular alarm. Every time a heat wave descended on Brooklyn, all the kids in the neighborhood were consigned to their rooms.

As I was performing my magic tricks for my brother in our bedroom one day, I wondered: If an epileptic person caught polio, would his seizures stop? Like magic? I also wondered: Were deaf people perhaps immune to the disease? I had never heard of a deaf person who had polio. My father hadn’t either. “We have enough trouble without polio,” he signed when I asked him about it. “Maybe God has spared us.”

But God did not spare Barry Goldstein, my friend from across the street. Late that summer, just as we were feeling the first hints of fall in the air and thinking that the danger might be over for the season, a blast of heat drove the cool air off. At the height of this last heat wave, Barry got sick. And his sickness became polio. Now I knew someone who had polio.

Barry was taken to Coney Island Hospital and was immediately put into an iron lung. For the next few weeks it was touch and go, but finally he stabilized. The iron lung did his breathing for him.

One day Barry’s father came to our apartment door with a handwritten note for my father: “You and Myron can visit my son if you want. I think he’d like that.”

The very next Saturday my father and I took the subway to Coney Island, and then we walked to the hospital. My father did not sign a single sign to me. There was nothing he could say to me that would lessen my shock at my friend’s illness and the sadness of his condition.