Hands of My Father: A Hearing Boy, His Deaf Parents, and the Language of Love (33 page)

I watched, hypnotized, in a state of incomprehension, alongside a group of neighbors at the curb directly across the street from the building. We stood there, looking up at him, as he poured gasoline over his head and shoulders and, in one incandescent instant, lit a match and burst into flame.

As I watched in stunned disbelief, not really understanding what my eyes were telling my brain, he calmly stepped off the roof in a ball of fire. Trailing sparks and bits of flaming clothing, he fell directly onto the low iron picket fence that fronted the building. The fence buckled at the impact of his falling body. He lay impaled on a pike of the picket fence, smoldering, his clothing turning to ash as the green paint on the fence blistered, then bubbled away. For weeks afterward I would come across bits of charred fabric lying around the building.

The man was a stranger. He had come to our block to die. My father could not tell me why. For once, his hands were silent.

Many years later, when I was an army paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division, my father and mother came down to visit me at Fort Bragg, near Fayetteville, North Carolina, where I was stationed. And, of course, my father had timed their visit to coincide with a mass parachute jump, which is always an impressive sight. As wave after wave of C-119s took off from Pope Air Force Base, each wave of planes flew at an altitude barely fifty feet above the preceding wave, leaving just enough space between them that their propellers would not chew up the jumpers hanging in the air in front of them. In stately formation they passed over the three-mile-long sandy drop zone, thousands of parachutists jumping out the twin doors. The sky was filled, horizon to horizon, with slowly descending white silk petals. But one of those parachutists got into trouble. His static line had become entangled with the shoulder strap on his parachute.

The soldier dangled at the end of the canvas line for hours, as the crew, the copilot, and jumpmaster vainly attempted to pull him back into the plane, against the backstream of the twin propellers. It was useless, as the pressure of the turbulent air created by the backdraft of the propellers was simply too powerful a force to overcome.

Once the plane had burned up all its fuel flying in circles for hours, a layer of foam was sprayed on the runway and the plane was forced to land. As it rolled down the runway, the body trailed behind and bounced up and down in the foam.

It was later reported that the soldier had been unconscious when the plane touched down. But we all knew that was bull.

That evening my father talked about death. This was strange, because my father had never brought up the subject before. Even when his father died and we went to his funeral in the Bronx, my father had barely signed a thought to me. And when his mother had died, he cried but did not talk.

But during dinner that night he talked of death. The sign for death is one of the most poignant of signs, and one of the most descriptive in its abrupt visual expressiveness. It leaves no doubt as to its meaning. My father, in expressing his feelings about death and dying that night, constantly held his open hands in front of him, right palm down, death, left palm up, life. In that position, he stared at them thoughtfully and then reversed them.

“Death,” he signed, “is a stranger. Just like the stranger who came to our street to die.”

L
ater, much later, in another season, my father spent his last day on earth in the same hospital in Coney Island where I was born. There was not one person around him to whom he could express his resignation, his regrets, or his fears in his own language.

It has been twenty-nine years since my father died, alone, in a hospital ward in Brooklyn, filled with strangers who could not speak to him and who could not read his hands. If he had had the strength to do so, he would surely have left his bed and walked the few feet to a window of the ward to look out on the sandy beach of Coney Island, where fifty years previously he had first seen the dark-haired laughing deaf girl who would become his wife.

My mother and I had been with him all that day (my brother, at the time, was working in Virginia), and we had just gone out to get something to eat. My mother had signed as she left his bedside, “We’ll be
right
back.” When we returned to his room, barely an hour after we left him, his bed was empty and had been neatly remade.

No one on the floor could tell us where my father was.

“Try the morgue,” one nurse advised over her shoulder as she rushed about.

With my frantic mother at my side, we descended in the elevator to the basement morgue.

Exiting the elevator, we found ourselves in a dimly lit circular lobby empty of any living people—but filled end to end with sheet-covered gurneys. My mother jackknifed into herself and stayed closed as if she would never open again. I held her to me.

Unfolding finally, she shook me off and went to the first gurney. She lifted the sheet, glanced at the face beneath, and moved on. From gurney to gurney she repeated the process: lift a corner of the sheet, take a quick look, and move on. Eventually, she stopped moving on, and flung herself across the cold, still body of my dead father.

A
t the entrance to the Brooklyn cemetery where my father was to be buried, a short line of Orthodox Jewish men stood forlornly along the roadside in the lightly falling rain, hoping to make a few dollars for reciting Kaddish, the traditional Hebrew blessing. My mother asked me to hire one of them to say what she considered to be magic words over her husband’s grave.

At my father’s open grave, the endless string of words, unheard by my mother and incomprehensible to the rest of us—my brother, my wife, my children, my mother’s sister, and my father’s two sisters and his brother—droned on endlessly, until I tapped the black-garbed bearded stranger on the shoulder, thanked him, and gave him the agreed-upon payment for his services. Then we stood there, looking at my father’s dripping coffin sitting on twin rails, each of us thinking about the man inside, now silent, as we all will be.

M
y mother lived another twenty-eight years and remained in relatively good physical health until she was eighty-nine. That year, however, a series of medical problems made it clear she could no longer live on her own.

My brother loved our mother deeply but was still working full-time, now for the City of New York. He agreed that since I was retired and could give her the attention she needed, I would take her with me to Palm Springs (where my wife and I had moved many years before).

No sooner had she settled into her new life with us than she fell to the floor one night and suffered a broken hip—the first of many accidents and illnesses that would slowly but steadily drain her body and her spirit.

During the next six years she would sporadically sign to me, “I want to die!”

“No, you don’t,” I would say rather inanely. “You have so much to live for.” And then I would frantically enumerate all the things I thought she should live for.

My mother would turn away from me, unconvinced.

In frustration one day, I added to the list of things to live for, “
Wait,
I wrote a book.”

“You wrote a book?” she signed incredulously. “What’s it about?”

“A big snowstorm in Brooklyn,” I said, “and a boy who has a dream, and the mother who wakes him with her kiss.”

“Sounds interesting. I’ll wait for that.”

And so my mother lived another six years, waiting first for that book, and then when it was published, and she said, again, “I want to die!” the next book after that one.

Twice a year Irwin would fly out to visit our mother. Her absence from his life was a significant loss. His apartment in New York City had been convenient to hers, and he had been in the habit of visiting her one night during the week, and taking her to a movie and then to dinner on Sundays. With so much time to make up for, my brother found that his biannual ten-day visits seemed to end as soon as they began, which was very hard for him.

Shortly before she died, my mother had been in the hospital on one of her ever more frequently recurring admissions. One morning on my daily visit I found her deeply asleep. Her veined, liver-spotted hands were resting silently at her sides. As I sat by her bed watching, they came alive and began to sign in a language I did not understand. As a boy, I had often seen my mother and father signing their private signs to each other. Signs whose meaning they never shared with me. However, one sign I did recognize: the sign for death.

As I watched my mother, still deeply asleep, signing into the air, I was sure her indecipherable signs were meant for my father. I like to think that she was telling him with her hands, in their private language, that he would not have much longer to wait.

W
hen we knew my mother had but a week to live, my brother flew out from New York to beat her side. During the week of her dying, my brother and I spent some time talking to each other about our shared experiences as hearing children born to two deaf parents. This was the first time we had ever done so. We spoke often, and late, about our experiences being raised by the people our neighbors at that time called “the deafies in apartment 3A.”

Our mother has been dead now for several years, and our father more than thirty, and yet my brother and I still cannot agree on how that shared experience—growing up in apartment 3A with our deaf father and mother, so many years ago—has affected our lives down to this day. We no longer argue about our different impressions of what being deaf meant to them, or about how their being deaf has impacted us; at our age we finally realize that we will never agree.

There is one thing, however, that we do agree on: how much we both loved them, and how terribly we miss them.

I
scattered my mother’s ashes in the four places I thought she’d like to be remembered, the four compass points of her life.

On a bitterly cold and unseasonably snowy day in early April, I carefully spread some of her ashes, strangely warm and heavy in my hands, in a wide circle over the sands of Coney Island, approximating the circle that the deaf had made in their beach chairs almost eighty years before, when my mother was a beautiful young woman, displaying her perfect young body in a tight-fitting wool bathing suit, her life stretching out into a seemingly distant future. I imagined the depressions in the sand that were made by her small feet. As the wind swirled about me, I watched her bone-white ashes blow off, mingling with the pure white falling snow, to be absorbed forever into the waiting empty sands.

Then I waded into the surf; my legs burned with the shock of the cold water and immediately went numb. As I stood knee-deep in the icy waves that died on the shore and then ebbed away, I released a few more grains of my mother’s ashes. They floated off, drawn deeply into the vast ocean, toward Ireland, the same ocean that eighty summers ago she had swum so tirelessly, leaving us behind in the early morning, not returning until the afternoon. I stood on the cold shore remembering how as a boy I would wait at the edge of this ocean until catching sight of her white rubber-capped head bobbing above the waves, her slim nut-brown arms languidly stroking the water, and her strong shoulders sparkling with diamonds of sunlight, as she came straight toward me. Thrashing through the surf, long legs striding against the outgoing tide, she would swoop me up in her arms. I would cling to her, all warm from the sun, my head nuzzling her wet neck, breathing the ends of her cropped matted hair smelling of the deepest ocean.

Later that same day, as the snow continued to fall, I buried some more of my mother’s ashes in a small hole I had dug in the ivy-covered mound humped over my father’s grave in a cramped Brooklyn cemetery filled with leaning snow-topped headstones. In the profound silence of the empty cemetery, the snow quickly covered the small grave that her ashes rested in, over the larger mound of my father’s casket. As I watched, kneeling, head bowed, the snow fell silently, covering everything with its soft blanket.

Back in California, I spread some more of my mother’s ashes on the naked stone lip of San Jacinto Mountain, towering ten thousand feet over Palm Springs, where she had lived with me, with occasional pleasure and much resignation, the last six years of her life. In those final years, when our respective roles had been completely reversed, I now the parent, she the child, I came to know my mother, and through her, my childhood, as I never had before. And I recalled the lines of T. S. Eliot: “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”

Finally, in Santa Monica, where my wife and I also have a home (and my mother often visited before she became ill), I spread my mother’s ashes in an imaginary line beginning at the base of a solitary cluster of palm trees leaning into each other, which seemed to me to resemble my tight-knit, insular family. The thin trail of ashes continued across the sands of a California beach and ended in the ocean, where I submerged myself in the tumbling surf, letting the sea reclaim from my cupped hand the last few grains.

Now, from the bluff at the foot of my street, a hundred feet above the bustling daily traffic on the Pacific Coast Highway, where no doubt the drivers think of the Dow and not of death, I have an unbroken line of sight over the indwelling palm trees, across the corrugated sand, and into the timeless ocean. From the shoreline, my gaze travels on the broad blue back of the ocean to the blue-gray horizon that bleeds into the gray-blue sky.