Hands of My Father: A Hearing Boy, His Deaf Parents, and the Language of Love by Myron Uhlberg Read Free Book Online Page B

signed with obvious glee.
    My mother just looked at me, as if seeing me for the first time, dumbstruck. She had never, in all the eight years of my life, witnessed such a signing performance. She was impressed.
    In 1942 Joe Louis was inducted into the United States Army, along with a million other young boys and grown men. So were two of my mother’s younger brothers: Harry, the quiet one, who, to the consternation of his mother, Celia, dated only Italian girls and was as chary of his words as he was of his money; and Milton, the youngest, who always had much to say, all of it directed at the failures of the capitalist system. In those simple days you volunteered; you did not wait to be drafted. It was a different war, a much different time.
    There would be no more fights for the duration. Even kids knew what the “duration” meant—until the war was over. While this life-and-death struggle was being fought, everything in our young lives would be suspended for the “duration.” And the cry went up all over Brooklyn, from a million mothers’ lips, every time we asked for something: “Don’t you know there’s a war on!” That effectively ended every discussion.
    The fact that I could now take a break from my special signing was okay with me, as I didn’t think I had another round in me after that epic fight.
    By 1946, however, when the war was over and Joe Louis resumed his boxing career, I was thirteen and stronger. Although my signing was now much more sophisticated and complex, my father insisted I continue to sign the fights as I had in the old days, with my special signing. So it was lucky for me that I had gained in strength and endurance, because Louis was now older and slower; he did not finish off his opponents as quickly as he once had. His bouts lasted many rounds. In 1947 he took the full fifteen rounds to gain a decision over the up-and-coming Jersey Joe Walcott. My father told me that that was my best performance as a fighter…he meant, signer.
     
     
    I n 1949 my father bought a DuMont television set. It had been reduced to $999. In those days the minimum wage was forty cents an hour. How my father managed this purchase is still beyond me. Being deaf, however, he viewed television not as a luxury but as a necessity.
    With a plastic magnifying lens hooked to the front of the set by two wires, the eye-squinting eight-by-ten-inch screen was blown up to a highly distorted twenty-inch one. The resulting watery, convex image made us feel like goldfish looking out through the glass sides of a fish tank.
    From now on my father would watch the fights on TV. There was no longer any need for me to sign them for him.
    And so I retired, undefeated. In an extended ceremony, as my mother looked on with great amusement, my father crowned me with a newspaper hat that he had made out of a page from the day’s paper; I was now the reigning world champion of boxing signs.
    At the conclusion of the ceremony, my father signed to me wistfully, “Sure, I like to see the fights on TV now, but somehow they just don’t have the same excitement as when you were in your prime.” I felt good knowing this. But then he added, a gleam in his eye, a smile on his lips, “And they sure aren’t nearly as funny.”
      Memorabilia  
     
    Sounds in the Night
     
    O ne night, long after I had gone to bed, I was awakened by strange sounds in our otherwise silent apartment. It sounded as if someone were being beaten, the blows accompanied by grunts and muffled screams.
    I jumped out of bed and rushed to my parents’ bedroom. Their door was closed, but it was never locked as, being deaf, they dared not shut out their hearing son.
    I threw open the door, realizing as I did that this was where the sounds were coming from. Rushing into the dimly lighted room, I saw my father on top of my mother. He was grunting, and she was moaning. It was a frightening sight. I leaped on my father’s bare back, screaming into his deaf ears, “Stop!