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

vigorously, until the pigeons wheeled out of sight.
    The first time I ever watched this happen, I thought, the big show-off, now he’s lost his pigeons. Now who will he have to talk his baby talk to? Not me! Just as I thought those pigeons must surely be flying over the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey, and from there to California, Frankie stamped the end of his pole on the roof, and miraculously they reappeared in the Brooklyn sky. In ever-diminishing circles they returned to our roof, where in a graceful fall, single file, they reentered the coop.
    Frankie closed the cage door and told them in his pigeon language that they were beautiful. They sat, pigeon feet clinging to their perch, bobbing their heads in total agreement.
    When the weather was clear, I would go to my roof with my official enemy plane-spotter cards and my father’s binoculars. Kneeling behind the brick outer wall, so as not to be seen by the enemy pilots, I would look out over Coney Island. That’s the direction the German planes would come from. Why they would come to Brooklyn was a question that never entered my mind. Perhaps to bomb Nathan’s Famous, whose food sustained the morale of every citizen of Brooklyn. The loss of their franks and buttered corn would be a near-mortal blow.
    Those German planes never came. They must have known from enemy intelligence that I was on guard, ever vigilant, protecting Brooklyn.
     

     
    M y roof was not just a summer place.
    In the winter, after a heavy snowfall, when the rest of the kids ran down into the street, I would go in the other direction. Pushing the roof door open against the piled-up snow was a challenge. But once accomplished, I had the roof all to myself. I would spend hours trekking through the accumulation of snow, my footprints the only ones disturbing its smooth surface.
    When enough snow had fallen, I made enormous snowballs. They were cannonball size. Then bomb size. These I proceeded to lob over the wall onto the unsuspecting neighbors below. I was not the bombardier of a B-17 Flying Fortress, and I had no Norden bombsight, but my accuracy was positively uncanny.

 
    6
    Clothes Make the Boy
     

     
    O ne morning toward the end of summer, my father shook me awake with his strong printer’s hands. An annual tradition was about to be set in motion.
    “School starts thirty days from now,” his hands fairly screamed at me. “There is a big sale on boys’ suits at Mr. R. and H. Macy’s store today. We must hurry!”
    My father, who had never owned a single suit as a boy, now insisted that his son have a new one every year. Every summer, about a month before the beginning of the school year, as regular as clockwork, the ritual of buying a new suit for me would begin. And once begun, the ritual was my signal that summer was over. Oh, sure, the calendar on my wall still said “August,” but this day signaled that the calendar was lying; I could almost feel the chill of autumn on my bare skin.
    “Time is short. Hurry! Hurry!” he signed with an insistent choppy movement of his hands. “We’ve got to get a move on before all the good stuff is snapped up.”
    “Good stuff? Snapped up?” I mumbled under my breath. I didn’t have to mumble. My father wouldn’t hear me. He was deaf. But I did have to be careful, because he could read my lips.
    Slowly I dragged myself out of bed. I was in no rush to begin this day. A day that would bring me no joy. A day that was sure to be wall-to-wall embarrassment as I played the go-between, negotiating the transaction of buying a suit with my father on one side, and a bunch of unsympathetic, impatient, hearing salesmen all working on commission on the other side. For them, time was money. My father had all the time in the world to select just the right suit for his son. They had none to spare.
    “We’ll start with Mr. Bloomingdale,” my father’s hands informed me. “His basement has a ton of suits. All with two pants. And he has the best