Hands of My Father: A Hearing Boy, His Deaf Parents, and the Language of Love (13 page)

“Can we get a set for Irwin?” I asked my father. “That way Mother will be doubly surprised.”

Readily agreeing, my father, like the great director he was, staged the conclusion of the final act: egg cream sodas for both of us. And so the curtain came down, the play was over: I had my new suit, and he had his day alone with his son.

7

A Day in the City

I
had never gotten closer to where my father worked than the feeling of a newspaper hat on my head, which he made from the paper he brought home every evening. But one day when he was on vacation, he took me to the
New York Daily News
building.

That morning he selected the clothes I would wear—that year’s new suit, of course. Then he dressed himself in his best clothes and freshly polished shoes. After kissing my mother and brother goodbye, we went down into the street. As dressed up as I had ever seen him, hat rakishly angled on his head, he took my hand in his, and we walked to the Kings Highway stop on the BMT subway, where we descended the stairs and stood on the platform for the train to Manhattan. As we waited for the train to arrive, I couldn’t help but notice how happy my father seemed.

The train took us into the city, where we transferred to another train, which took us to a stop near my father’s workplace.

Exiting the subway, my father took my hand and urged me to walk faster. Soon we arrived in front of the
New York Daily News
building.

I stood with my father outside the ornate, glass-covered entrance to the lobby. No matter how far backward I bent, I simply could not see the top of the building. Leaning back as far as my spine would allow, I struggled in vain to see the top of this snow-white tower. The rows of vertical white-brick panels rose from the city sidewalk, where I stood in my heavily shined shoes, straight up into a limitless blue sky, where they seemed to merge into a single point, thirty-seven floors above my head. Blimpy white clouds looked like fat dirigibles sailing slowly overhead, preparing to dock on the roof, just as real zeppelins once did on the roof of the Empire State Building.

Pushing our way through the revolving door, we entered the splendor of the high-domed lobby of the
New York Daily News.
I had never seen anything like it. The vast space was dark, lit in strategic spots by recessed lighting. The floor we stood on was of slick terrazzo squares. And there in front of me, sitting halfway down a wide deep hole, behind a chrome railing, revolved an enormous globe. The globe spun on its axis, basking in the rays shed by the soft spotlights positioned overhead; it was illuminated from below by the lights shining from a circle of glass steps that rose out of the depths to the brass belt around the equator.

It was a solitary, endlessly spinning object, bathed in light, in the otherwise dark lobby. My first sight of that magnificent spinning ball, which represented the earth where I lived, took my breath away. Every known country was outlined in bright colors. Every city, noted. The seven blue oceans divided the continents. The North Pole whitely capped the top of the revolving globe, while its distant relative, the South Pole, completed the picture deep down in the well. I was awestruck, although I later learned that the genius who had designed this magnificent spectacle had set the globe to turning in the wrong direction when it was initially installed.

As I stared in amazement, I began to wonder where my block was. And for that matter, where was
Brooklyn
? I then realized what a giant ball would be necessary to show West Ninth Street. It would have to be at least the size of the Wonder Wheel in Coney Island. And—my imagination was in full flight now—the lobby that housed such a globe would have to be the size of…what? I simply couldn’t imagine. As for the size of the building that could house the lobby that contained a globe the size of the Wonder Wheel—I had reached the outer limit of what even my fervid imagination was capable of.

“Nice,” I signed.

After I’d had my fill of the lobby, we rode the elevator, ascending in a stomach-dropping whoosh to the floor on which my father worked. The elevator car stopped with a suddenness that threatened to bring up my breakfast.

From the moment I left the quiet of the elevator car, and penetrated the wall of sound that greeted me when we arrived at the printing press floor, I literally could not hear myself think. The noise was deafening. For the remainder of my visit that day I hardly ever took my fingers out of my ears.

In the enormous pressroom seven printing presses, each as big as a two-story house, were pounding away, printing sixty thousand copies of the
Daily News
an hour. These vast two-storied Rube Goldberg affairs were a mind-boggling collection of wheels, struts, rollers, and chains, into one end of which giant rolls of blank white paper were fed, eventually to be spat out in the form of finished newspapers at the other end.

Regardless of how far I stuffed my fingers into my eardrums, I simply could not shut out the sound of those presses. And the sound was not just in my ears, for the thundering rumble that rose up from the wood and concrete floor went straight up my legs and through my spine. I imagined this was what it would be like to be standing on an African plain, with a thousand elephants running past me in fear of their lives.

From work station to work station my father led me, showing off his son to each of his colleagues.

While the presses were running, the deaf pressmen wore newspaper hats on their hair (to protect them from the mist of ink that rose off the presses) and smiles of a job well done on their faces. Their hearing co-workers, cotton wadding plugged into their ears, wore matching newspaper hats on their heads but pained expressions on their faces.
Now
I understood why my father and his deaf pals had been hired, and were valued, by Captain Patterson.

When the presses shuddered to a stop and the last copy of the day’s newspaper came down the conveyer belt, my father waved goodbye to his co-workers in the pressroom and marched me off to the composing room, which was where he worked. This huge space housed row upon row upon row of chattering linotype machines, manned by row upon row of workers. Here there was a different sound. Unlike the rolling rumble of panicked elephants in the pressroom, the composing room was filled with the sound of metal clanging on metal, which brought to mind a jungle crowded with monkeys in full cry. Back into my ears went my fingers.

The workers stood shoulder to shoulder, their nimble fingers extracting lead-font type from the drawers of waist-high metal cases, manipulating them with great dexterity into steel frames. Every so often a lead slug containing a group of words, or an advertisement that had been produced on a linotype machine, was dropped in alongside the loose letters of type. When the “page” was completed, the whole affair was locked into place with a metal key.

This was where my father stood five days a week, year after year, from the beginning to the end of his working life. Hunched over his work station, eyeshades protecting his eyes from the murderous glare of the overhead fluorescent strips of light, my father labored, turning lead-type letters into words and sentences. He loved his work.

Pushing me in front of him, he led me forward to meet his deaf pals, who immediately stopped their work and greeted me with warmth, each vying for my attention by making large exaggerated signs. My father told me later that his deaf friends were comparing my signing ability with that of their own children of a similar age. He told me I had done well in their eyes, as some of them had children who didn’t sign very proficiently. This was usually the case with the second child (in those days two kids was the norm), because that child was not required to be the family interpreter. The exception, he explained, was when the second child was a girl, as girls tended to be better signers than boys. (My father told my mother that night, when he recapped the day for her, that Myron had received a great compliment from his pals—he signed like a girl. Seeing my father’s hands sign “same as a girl,” my brother laughed out loud. I, on the other hand, found no humor in the “compliment.”)

Meeting my father’s hearing co-workers was another matter entirely. These were men who had never once exchanged a meaningful sentence with my deaf father in all the years they had stood side by side in this room. I politely shook every hand offered, but some of the comments I heard, when I removed my fingers from my ears so as to shake those rough hands, echo in my mind to this day. To my face the men said, “Nice to meet you, kid. How come you can hear?” And “How do you like having a deaf father?” “Why does your father talk funny?” “Did your father ever go to school?” And one man even asked me, “Did your father become deaf because his mother dropped him on his head?” This guy wasn’t kidding.

My father, oblivious to these questions, proudly beamed down at me as he saw my small hand engulfed in the large hands of his “pals.” And that was bad enough, as far as I was concerned.

But what I heard when we walked away, and people spoke behind our backs, as though I too were unable to hear, remains seared into the walls of my mind. “Look at the dummy’s kid. He looks normal.” “Lou has a nice-looking kid. I wonder why.” “Hey, look at that, the dummy’s kid. He can talk good.” “Would you believe it? The dummy has a kid who can talk.” Even then I knew enough to be ashamed of my shame, but I could not overcome it.

Many, many years later, just before my father died, he told me that he knew quite well what his hearing co-workers at the
New York Daily News
really thought of him.

But for that one shining afternoon my father was a proud man, proud in his love of his work, and proud of his son, his firstborn son whom he loved with all his heart.

 
Memorabilia
 

Gone Fishing

I
n memory, I see my father’s arms. They were strong arms that ended in equally strong printer’s hands, topped off with sensitive, surprisingly slender printer’s fingers: fingers that could delicately select assorted loose lead-font type and insert it onto his typestick to create words and sentences that he loaded into a “chase,” a steel frame that would comprise a single page of the next day’s newspaper. His deft fingers would then lock in the loose type with a key called a “quoin.”

These fingers also knew well how to tie a trout fly and how to thread a live worm onto a fishhook so delicately that the worm moved as if it were still burrowing in the dark warm earth until the instant a fish informed it otherwise.