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

control panel. “Look. DON’T TOUCH!” was my constant admonition. But now that he had his own engineer’s cap, I magnanimously allowed him to control the magnetic derrick that offloaded the freight cars. I soon regretted this gesture, as from then on he insisted I stop the trains every time they passed the derrick.
    As I grew older, I lost interest in my trains, and my brother took over. It thrilled him to run the three sets of trains simultaneously at excessive speeds, until they jumped the track—much to my father’s consternation.
    Eventually Irwin also lost interest in the train set. And one day my father dismantled the whole project and sent it off to a younger cousin of ours—along with my engineer’s hat.
     

 
    5
    Heaven
     

     
    A lthough I could not help but resent my brother’s dependence on me, I was also ashamed of my feelings. I knew guilt at an age when most children have no sense of such an emotion. When this toxic brew would overcome me, I often sought to escape to the one place where I could be truly alone—the roof of our apartment building.
    The roof was my personal heaven, my sanctuary. On a summer’s day I would sit in solitary silence, my back to the low warm brick wall that edged the roof, with nothing but blue sky above my head. On that roof, on such a day, my ears were not filled with the incessant sounds of my Brooklyn block; nor were my eyes filled to overflowing with the incessant signs of my father, or the image of my brother suddenly stiffening and dropping to the ground.
    On the roof I would read every copy of my extensive comic book collection, over and over again. I would get lost in the adventures recounted in these stories—the close calls, the speeding trains, the angry lions, the nefarious crooks—and dream I was a normal kid.
     

     
    T he roof wasn’t just my own, of course; it was communal property. On summer evenings the neighbors would gather there to cool off, sitting in family groups on blankets spread over the graveled tarpaper, covered edge to edge with cold chicken, beer, lemonade, potato salad, cakes, and cookies. We kids would migrate from blanket to blanket, begging a cookie or a drumstick, for no other reason than to see if somebody else’s food tasted any different from our mother’s efforts.
    Tuesday nights in summer were special. As the sky darkened over Coney Island, fireworks were shot up into the sky over the Atlantic, where they burst into incandescent blooms of light against the purpled horizon. On rooftops all over Bensonhurst, collective OOOHHHHs and AAAHHHHs rose to the heavens, in a chorus of appreciation. For once my father’s deaf voice blended into the rest and was unremarked upon. And my little brother sat mercifully still, watching with open mouth and glazed eyes, nodding in time with the exploding of each new pyrotechnic display.
     
     
    O n one side of the roof was Frankie’s pigeon coop. Behind the chicken wire, sitting shoulder to shoulder on doweled roosts, were hundreds of gray pigeons, all facing in the same direction.
    I would hide behind the brick chimney when I heard Frankie open the heavy metal roof door. And from there, unseen, I would watch him talk to his pigeons for hours. Frankie was not dumb, but he talked baby talk to those birds. They seemed to like it, so who was I to object? Besides, I knew sign language, not pigeon language. Maybe Frankie’s words were making sense to the birds. They sure seemed to be listening.
    After a while he opened the cage door, and with a long bamboo pole he shooed the birds off their roost and into the air. They flew as one, like a gray cloud, up, up into the blue sky over our roof, shedding a mist of slowly falling feathers in their wake, leaving their white calling cards on the black macadam below.
    With the bamboo pole Frankie waved the flock into ever-expanding circles, extending over Avenue P and Kings Highway.
    Not content with that feat of magic, he waved the pole ever more