On a hot summer day when my brother was eight months old, my father carried him to the top step of the back porch, lifted him over his head, and tossed him into the weeds. Benny wasn’t hurt badly, considering: his left wrist and elbow were broken, his shoulder was dislocated, and he had a serious concussion. My father took him to the hospital and sat up with him all night. We didn’t find out until about six months later that, besides the broken bones, Benny was deaf.
Right after that, my father changed. He never again touched Benny or me in anger; he hardly touched us at all, because my mother wouldn’t let him get that close. My father didn’t seem interested in fighting with her. Besides, from the moment he found out that Benny was deaf, my father was busy researching deafness, treatments, cures, and education as if his life depended on it. It took him six years to decide that Benny should attend deaf school. It would have been sooner than that, but there was the problem of my mother.
My father and I had no trouble accepting Benny’s deafness; it became part of who he was, like being left-handed and redheaded. But my mother never stopped believing that it was all some sort of hoax; that Benny had just gone on strike and would one day turn his head when she walked into the room and say, “Mama.” She refused to treat Benny as if he were deaf, which was all right, except that she would get angry at him for things like not coming in to supper when she called. To my mother, the doctors’ diagnosis of “irreversible, trauma-induced, prelingual, and profound deafness” was just another part of the hoax.
There were times that I envied Benny’s deafness, because he never had to hear the hollering that went on at night when my father tried to convince my mother that we had to do something soon. One night, my mother ran screaming into the bathroom. There were ominous crashing sounds from inside, and my father pounded on the door. The silence that followed was even scarier than the screaming. When the door opened, my mother came out and said in a dead-sounding voice, “Take him wherever you want.” The next morning when I went to the bathroom, the mirror had a long, jagged crack, and there were small brown flecks of dried blood on it.
When we finally brought Benny to the deaf school, it was late winter and the snow was piled high on both sides of the road. Benny had not wanted to get in the car; he knew something was going on. The tension between my parents was palpable. He made the sounds he usually made when he was scared, and except for that there was absolute silence in the car. When we turned off the highway onto the road that would take us to the school, Benny got anxious and very loud. I think he was scared because on the two-lane road the snow was piled fifteen feet high on either side. We couldn’t see anything but those huge, white, silent walls. When Benny got loud my mother actually put her fingers in her ears. My father yelled at her to take them out, and about that time Benny threw up his morning’s bowl of Cap’n Crunch.
I hated vomit, and some of it was on my shoes, so I yelled, and my father gave us one of the looks he used now in place of anger. Then he pulled off to the side of the road and came around to clean things up with an old oil-soaked rag. My mother stayed where she was, firmly harnessed in place by her seat belt and the purse on her lap.
At the deaf school, everyone was polite, even though Benny and I smelled like vomit and oil. It was like any other school, except there were lights everywhere that flashed along with the bells. The lights were for the kids who couldn’t hear the bells, even though the bells were really loud. It was just as noisy between classes as any school, except the noise sounded strange to people not accustomed to the way deaf people talk, and the kids and adults used their hands very fast.
When we went to Benny’s kindergarten room, I was relieved to see he wouldn’t be the oldest kid there. The teacher wore a hearing aid and talked just fine, using her hands at the same time so that the kids could follow her part of the conversation with us. My mother didn’t like the idea of a deaf person teaching her son, but my father silenced her with a look.
While my father and mother were talking to the teacher, a little boy came up and started to talk to Benny with his hands. Benny was so excited he followed the boy without a backward glance. The boy took Benny around the room. He stopped at a wall of pictures and pointed to a bird that had “B-I-R-D” written underneath it in big letters; with his other hand he made a bird beak by the side of his mouth using his thumb and forefinger. Benny’s eyes got really big and he looked at the boy’s hand, the picture, and the word underneath. Then he made the bird beak with his hand and started to laugh, a deep, hearty, normal sound. My mother said she didn’t know if she wanted her son to learn how to talk with his hands.
I went to sign-language classes right away so I could try to talk to Benny. He usually thought I was pretty funny, but I think he was glad I was at least trying, because he had to write and speechread with my parents, and that was hard work for him. Sign language is beautiful to watch, but not as easy to learn as you might think.
The following winter we had what we referred to thereafter as “Benny’s first Christmas.” Benny had enjoyed Christmas before, the presents and the lights on the houses especially. But he hadn’t known why all these things were happening. Now he came home from school with a load of clumsily wrapped presents and a happy look on his face. My mother, however, was expecting that by this time he would have gotten over pretending to be deaf and would serenade her with carols.
Two of the presents Benny gave Christmas morning were ones he had made in crafts class. My father received a clay ashtray and immediately christened it with one of his rare cigars. I got a papier-mâché Christmas ornament with my name spelled out in glitter. It was pretty good work for an almost-eight-year-old brother. But Benny gave my mother a store-bought present: a bottle of a cologne called Tabu. He had saved up for it from his dollar-a-week allowance. Mother made a big deal over it and hugged Benny and cried. From then on, she always wore that kind of cologne.
That Christmas, through simple signs and slow, garbled speech and big, sloppy letters, Benny told us about life at the school. He had been given a name sign. (A name sign is usually the first letter of your name spelled out in the manual alphabet, combined with a sign that is characteristic of you.) For Benny, who had been an outsider at the school because of his late admittance, a name sign was an indication of acceptance. His sign was the letter B (which is made with the palm facing out, the thumb across the palm and the other four fingers standing straight together) at the side of his mouth, opening and closing like the sign for bird he had learned that first day. I told him it was a pretty cool name sign.
After Benny left, things got worse at home. My father had to take part-time jobs to pay for Benny’s schooling. My mother argued that she couldn’t work because she was raising me. I didn’t see much of my father during that time, but he always made a point of taking time off whenever Benny came home. Although the cause of Benny’s deafness was never mentioned in our house, I could tell that the thought of it kept my father working hard to provide for Benny. When I got to high school, I took a job at a fast-food restaurant and became fairly self-sufficient when it came to clothes and other expenses. It felt good to help my father that way.
When Benny was fourteen, he announced with fast, direct signs that he was no longer taking speech therapy. When I translated for my mother, she went berserk. Benny tried to tell her why, but she wouldn’t listen. She clawed at her scalp and ran to the bathroom, locking the door behind her. I got scared and called my father, who raced home from his night job. Benny stood at the bathroom door and knocked and called to her in his garbled speech, unaware that she was screaming back at him, “Shut up! Shut up, you freak! I hate you!”
My father had to break the door down. The bathroom was spattered with little drops of blood, just like before.
My parents separated after that, but they stayed married until Benny’s senior year. My father enrolled in sign-language class that year because he wanted to be able to sign at Benny’s graduation. His teacher once told me, “He means so well and tries so hard, but his hands just have no flexibility. They’re great big hands — beautiful, really — but he can’t form some of the letters in the manual alphabet. Could he have arthritis? But he can read signs well. He’ll make a good listener.” I was sad because he wasn’t going to be able to sign well, and because I had never noticed my father’s hands.
Even after the separation, my mother still never took a job. When she needed something done, she would call my father, wait for him to come up the front walk, and then get in the car and drive away. I moved out as soon as I could afford it, because I couldn’t stand listening to the things she said about him.
The day of Benny’s graduation, though, we tried to pretend we were one big, happy family. When I arrived at the house, I could tell from the way my mother was crashing the vacuum cleaner into the furniture that my father was already there. He was sitting out on the back porch. I signed, “Hello, Father. I miss you. How are you?”
His face lit up and he struggled to straighten and spread his fingers and answer, “Fine.”
“How’s Mom?” I asked, sitting down next to him.
He just jerked his head toward the banging inside.
“What’s wrong this time?”
“I don’t know. Benny’s got some wild plans to take off somewhere, and of course she wants him here.”
“Hope he gets far away.”
“Me too.”
Benny’s plans were to be an actor. He’d made his decision after seeing a deaf acting company perform at his school. Despite my mother’s vehement disapproval, he got a job with that same company for a couple of years. Then he went to New York, thinking he was ready to make it in the big city. He lived in a tiny apartment in the basement of an old church that was used as a theater during the week. He stayed there rent-free in exchange for being the janitor.
I visited him once in New York, bringing money from our father (who couldn’t afford it) and remonstrances from our mother (whom he ignored except to write her once a week). He lived in a bad neighborhood. Walking through it made me nervous, though Benny moved around like a pro. He was in his umpteenth production of The Fantasticks (it was a trend at the time to have The Mute played by a deaf person). It didn’t pay well, but Benny was optimistic that this time some producer would see him. It didn’t do any good to tell him there weren’t many nonspeaking starring roles. He was really good in the show, but how could I tell him that his dream was next to hopeless? Even if he’d been able to hear, how many people succeed as actors, anyway? I didn’t have the command of sign language that I needed to tell him what I thought, and whenever I tried he would just turn his head so he couldn’t see me or else complain that I was getting as bad as our mother. That was good for shutting me up.
My father got cancer of the stomach and went into the veterans’ hospital — a place he wanted to avoid, but he had no insurance. My mother wouldn’t visit him. “What’s the use,” she asked, “after the way he ruined Benny’s life?” I had a feeling she wasn’t referring to the accident but to his indulging Benny’s little joke. Not in all the time since the accident, even during their most bitter fights, had she ever mentioned how Benny had been deafened. I guess hurling that at my father would have meant admitting that Benny was deaf.
It was hard for me to tell Benny about our father, especially on the phone. My fingers weren’t used to the TDD keyboard; I had to hunt and peck. I told him I’d pay for his plane ticket home, but he said to call again when it was time for the funeral. Benny loved our father, but his career was his life, and he wouldn’t leave his show.
About four months after my father went into the hospital, Benny showed up. The play had closed. He had hitchhiked home.
Somehow, he persuaded our mother to go with us to visit our father. It was, I think, the first time we had all been together since the strained afternoon of Benny’s graduation from the deaf school.
It was a strange time for my mother to tell Benny the true story of how he became deaf. It’s not as if she couldn’t have waited a few days. My father was so sick, it couldn’t have been much of a victory for her. At first, Benny couldn’t understand her — she’d never learned to look at him and talk normally and always moved her mouth too much — and I refused to translate. My father was having a hard time hearing through the haze of painkillers. When everyone had finally heard, I thought something terrible would happen. I got a sick, heavy feeling in my stomach and my ears rang. My mother was smiling. My father was crying. Benny was just standing there.
“Why did you do it, you son of a bitch? Why?” my mother demanded.
“The strain . . . working all those jobs and trying to keep the peace at home. I didn’t mean to hurt him.”
“That was after!” she yelled. “The three jobs were after!”
There was confusion on his face. “Then why? Why would I do such a thing?” he asked.
“It’s all right, Papa. It’s all right,” Benny said as clearly as was possible for him. “I don’t blame you.” Then he turned to my mother and said, “You bitch,” and walked out the door.
Four days later, my father died. He had fallen asleep shortly after Benny had left that day, gone into a coma, and never woken up. My mother didn’t go to the funeral, but Benny and I did. I hired an interpreter so that Benny could follow it more easily. Benny didn’t flinch when the minister talked about what a good father our dad had been, just smiled gently at some memory he had saved up. So did I.
Benny moved into my father’s apartment and applied for a job at the post office, which was where many deaf people worked. Soon he was getting involved with the deaf community in town, writing skits and helping with sign-language classes at the junior college. He tried to convince me that he was finished with acting long before that day at the hospital, but I didn’t believe him.
They notified him first about our mother. He came over and described how she had stuffed towels around all the windows and doors in the kitchen and turned on the stove; how she’d died sitting in a chair in front of the stove and had vomited blood; how there had been no note.
“How come?” Benny asked with a shaking hand.
“I don’t know,” I replied, and my sign was big and full because I didn’t know how come anything had turned out the way it had.
The funeral took place on a raw, ugly day after a heavy snow. I felt sorry for the interpreter Benny had hired; it was cold and her hands must have been frozen. We didn’t stay around very long afterward. No one wanted to talk to Benny about anything personal through the interpreter, who was pretty and blond and had a sweet, high-pitched voice. On the ride home, Benny stared out the window at the snowdrifts as I concentrated on driving.
We went back to my apartment, where I fixed us something to eat out of the load of food that various friends had brought. Neither of us ate very much, but it felt good to sit at a table and act like a family. Benny was very withdrawn. When he got that way, I never could figure out if it was because he didn’t have anything to say, or because I didn’t understand sign language well enough for him to express himself. We watched TV for a while, but it was boring for him because I didn’t have a captioning device. He paced around the apartment and then said abruptly that he might as well go home. I started to ask him something, not knowing exactly how to put it, but he knew the question that had been in my heart since the day at the hospital.
“No,” he signed. “I don’t hate Father. I love him. I am . . .” and he made his name sign: the letter B by the side of his mouth, opening and closing like the beak of a bird. Then he went out into the white, silent night.
This story previously appeared in Kaleidoscope.
— Ed.
