Hands of My Father: A Hearing Boy, His Deaf Parents, and the Language of Love (17 page)

“That’s how I met Lou. At first I didn’t love him, like I thought I loved that boy. But I didn’t know what love was, when I was a girl. And when the nurse put you in my arms, just after you were born, I knew I had made the right decision.”

Then my mother came around the table, kissed me, and signed, “Eat!”

 
Memorabilia
 

What’s in a Name

O
n my street Paul Abruzzi’s nickname was Paulie; Frank was known as Frankie; Thomas, Tommy; John, Johnny; Ronald, Ronnie; and my pal Harold was called Heshie. I was the one kid on my block whose name, Myron, could not readily be turned into a nickname. But that didn’t stop my friends from giving me one: Mike—and then, of course, Mikey.

My mother would have been horrified, not to mention deeply offended, if she had known that I had abandoned what was, to her deaf ears, the beautiful-sounding name she had selected for me:
Myron.

But deaf parents typically create their own nicknames for their children, as it would be quite tedious and unnecessarily time-consuming to finger-spell every letter of a child’s name when seeking his attention or talking with him. Thus they give their children names that can be conveniently—and succinctly—signed. Such nicknames are known as name-signs.

A name-sign is not lightly decided upon. After all, this will be the way the parent addresses the child for the rest of his childhood—and often for the rest of his life.

My mother loved the name Myron so much that she wanted it to be recalled in my name-sign. So her first attempt at creating one for me involved using the initials of my name, M and U. My mother reasoned that MU must sound like the noise that cows make—MOO. Looking at me one day, she shaped her hands into an approximation of a cow’s horns by curling the three middle fingers inward to the palm and extending the thumb and pinky. These
horns
she placed on the sides of her head, thumbs touching her temples, and twisted them forward while sounding out in her deaf voice, MOOOO. “M.y.r.o.n.,” she finger-spelled. “How do you like this name?”

I didn’t!

One morning as I was about to run downstairs to play, my mother stopped me in my tracks and signed, “Wait! I have a new name for you.” The deaf believe that the ideal name-sign for a child should encapsulate in one visual gesture the very essence of the child. My mother’s second idea for a name-sign must have seemed to her like a no-brainer. She was sure that it truly captured the nature of her beloved child—the boy who seemed most comfortable high up on the limb of a tree or climbing walls. She looked into my eyes and began to scratch her sides repeatedly—which, of course, is the sign for
monkey.

Needless to say, I rejected this name-sign, too. I did not want my mother coming up to me, while I was playing in the street with my friends, and addressing me with the sign for
monkey.

Unable to find a name-sign that I would accept, my mother went back to the way she had addressed me since she named me as a baby—
MHHHAAARINNN.

A
ll of my life I never cared for my given name. I preferred to be known as Mike. My present wife, my two former wives, my three children, my grandchildren, my business associates, teammates, and friends, and even my bank all know me as Mike. In fact, when I left my deaf home, I ceased to be Myron to anyone except my parents. However, one day when talking with my mother—who had come to live with me at the age of eighty-nine, when she could no longer take care of herself—I summoned up the nerve to ask her why it was that she had named me Myron.

My deaf mother, who could not hear a sound, did not hesitate for an instant: “Because it
sounds
so beautiful.”

One day I received an advance copy of my first children’s book. I immediately showed it to my mother. Holding it lovingly on her lap as if it were a live thing and not just a book, she slowly traced my name with her finger, while a broad smile spread across her face. “Beautiful,” she signed. “MHHHAAARINNN,” she said.

I’ve preferred being called Myron ever since.

11

The Sound of Color

I
n those halcyon early days of public education, long before children would be held strictly accountable to a national testing demanded by a government that acknowledged little accountability for itself, public schools in Brooklyn routinely offered a class in arts and crafts. I, who had no artistic ability whatsoever, would bring home every week a crinkled sheet of sketch paper covered in indecipherable scrawls, with occasional splotches of color. And I, like every one of my classmates, no doubt, would be routinely commended by my teacher, and lavishly praised by my parents, for my “work of art.”

One day I showed my father a sketch I had done which, I explained—since an explanation seemed necessary—represented the Brooklyn Bridge.

“And here are the seagulls.” I pointed proudly at a tangle of black lines.

“Yes,” my father’s hands tentatively said. “I think I see them.”

Hanging over the tortured mess, I had colored in a red circle. A very red circle. It was the one spot of color on the entire page, my artistic sensibilities being quite cramped.

“And that’s the sun,” I signed with exaggerated imagination. “I call this ‘Morning in Brooklyn.’”

My father stared at the red circle. “Red,” he told me, “is an angry color. It sounds loud. Very loud. So loud that it sometimes hurts my ears.”

As I said, my father thought color had sound. I thought this strange, since my father was deaf and could hear no sound at all.

“Why do you think that?” I once asked him.

“In school I saw a painting of a man holding his ears. In the noisy picture the man was screaming. Above him the sky was an angry, swirling red color. I never forgot that painting.”

“Blue was a cool color,” he said, fanning his face. “Like water and must sound wet.”

I couldn’t begin to imagine what my father meant. Wet? What did
wet
sound like, anyway?

Hardly a day went by that my father did not find an occasion to ask me what a color sounded like.

“How does the color black sound?” he asked me one summer day as we were walking on Surf Avenue in Coney Island. It was the middle of August, and we were on our way to the beach. Above us gray storm clouds were gathering. They filled the sky. They were beginning to bump into each other. Where they merged, the gray blended into black. And where they piled up, one massive black cloud upon another, they turned an even darker shade of black. A cold salt-laden breeze suddenly swept down Surf Avenue from the direction of Nathan’s, loaded with the blended smells of grilled franks and mustard, knishes, hot buttered corn, and a subtle suggestion of popcorn.

Day turned into night as lightning split the darkness, followed by claps of thunder. The clouds cracked open, and torrential rain poured from the sky, quickly turning the steaming asphalt into small debris-cluttered rivers, overwhelming the storm drains, then backing them up, causing miniature waves to break across Surf Avenue. The rides emptied and stopped. People ran for cover as the rain fell in wind-driven sheets of water. I tugged on my father’s hand, but he stood still, looking up at the blackest sky I had ever seen.

“What does black sound like?” he asked me again.

Thunder loud enough to hurt my ears banged down on my head.

“Like thunder,” I signed, repeatedly banging my two fists together.

“I don’t understand,” he signed, his face pinched in frustration.

“What does
thunder
sound like?”

I was desperate. I was soaked. I began to shiver. “Like a hammer,” I signed, now raising and lowering my fist, as if I were striking my opposite fist with an invisible hammer.

My father thought about that, his face relaxing into comprehension. “Yes, like a hammer. Hard, like my hands.”

Satisfied, he took my hand, and we ran under an awning. The meager trees along the curb bent in the wind. Leaves torn from their thin branches flew all about us.

“I
feel
the wind on my face. Tell me, what is wind sound?” my father demanded.

As I was trying to come up with an answer for my father, the black clouds blew out over the ocean. The Wonder Wheel began to turn again, the empty white cars swinging out over the boardwalk, reflecting golden sunlight.

“Never mind,” my father signed. “We’ll go to the beach before all the good spots are taken.” My mother was home with a cold that day, and my brother was keeping her company. “Say hi to the deafies,” she had told me as we went out the door that morning.

“And say hi to Ben,” she added to my father, her hands laughing.

We were not the first to arrive at the small patch of beach that the deaf had long ago claimed as their very own, the place where they could all be together. Three deaf couples from the Bronx and one from Queens had gotten there before us. They always did, since they did not want to be relegated to the warmer, boardwalk side of the circle that would form and re-form all day long with each new arrival. We added our beach chair to the circle, which immediately expanded to accommodate us.

All morning long the deaf streamed in from every borough in New York. Each addition to the group caused conversations to stop in midair while chairs were lifted and readjusted to enlarge the circle, after which the hands resumed their flights in midsentence, gesturing furiously to one another.