英语传记：Hands of My Father（节选 3）

英语传记：Hands of My Father（节选 3）ZT

He knocks. The door opens, and he is greeted by a compact, tightly
coiled, unsmiling man in mismatched jacket and pants who waves at
him, making clumsy unintelligible signs with his large paint-stained
hands. My father does not understand a word he is saying but reasons
that this is a greeting of sorts, and an invitation to enter the
apartment.

My father enters and in a single glance takes in the entirety of the
apartment. From front to back, cheek to jowl, it is filled with
large, mismatched pieces of heavy dark wood furniture buffed to a
high shine. There seems to be at least two of everything, leaving
barely space to move about. My father thinks this apartment looks
more like a furniture shop on the Lower East Side than a living
space. Unbeknownst to him, my mother's father had rented all this
furniture and arranged for it to be delivered just that morning with
the thought of impressing him, the suitor of his daughter. My father
is not impressed. He is confused.

My mother sits at one of the two dining room tables, and as my
father signs his excited greeting to her, she bursts into tears. On
the two couches, staring expressionlessly at my father, sit the
family: mother, three sons, and another daughter.

Confused by the abundance of furniture, the stony looks of the
family, and the tears of my mother, my father wonders what he has
gotten himself into. He finally seats himself in one of the twelve
chairs surrounding the two dining room tables, facing the family.

At once, as if in a coin-operated game at Coney Island, the frozen
tableau comes to life, and all the members of my mother's family
break into excited gestures and frantic hand- and arm-waving. They
are trying to put my father at ease, but their homemade signs are
virtual Greek to his eyes. Perhaps, my father thinks, this is a
Brooklyn accent.

My father smiles politely and occasionally nods in agreement at what
he thinks is the appropriate time.

My mother wipes her tears away, and for the first time since her
father opened the front door, she smiles a shy tentative smile. All
doubt and confusion depart from my father's mind. He addresses her
father and begins to make his case in simple sign language and
written notes. My mother's father does not understand a word my
father is saying. He does not understand the signs. Must be a Bronx
accent, he thinks. And my father's notes are largely incom-
prehensible to him.

Nonetheless he smiles from time to time behind his shaggy gray
beard, nodding in tune with my father's broad gestures. Emboldened
by the seeming agreement, my father grows more expansive in his
signs, describing his position as a printer at the "New York Daily
News," "lobster shift" to be sure, but daytime work just around the
corner now that he has his union card.

My mother translates what my father says in their homemade signs.
Now her father smiles broadly and nods energetically. He feels
confident that this serious young deaf man really is the answer to
his prayers. This is someone who is from his daughter's world,
someone who will be able to take care of her.

My father has no more to say. He has made his case to the girl's
father. But what of the girl?

My father asks her father if he can take his daughter out for the
rest of the afternoon. Perhaps a walk on the boardwalk. "'Yes, yes,
by all means,'" the bearded face nods in agreement.

My father and this beautiful girl walk on the boardwalk from Coney
Island to Brighton Beach, then back again to the starting point.
Although the girl has gone to the Lexington School for the Deaf and
is as fluent in sign language as my father, they have said very
little to each other. Now they rest on a bench and look at the waves
rolling in, one after the other, with great interest, while their
hands sit quietly in their laps.

As the light fades from the sky over Coney Island, signaling the
beginning of the end of this momentous day, my father takes my
mother's hand in his strong printer's hands and gently squeezes her
fingers. She returns the pressure with a slight acknowledging
squeeze of her own.

One week later three strong young men climb five flights of wooden
stairs and quickly remove all the splendid two-of-everything rented
furniture. Rented by the day, it has served its purpose, now that my
father has proposed and Sarah has accepted. On the return trip the
men bring up the original shabby, mismatched pieces--which come in
ones, not twos.


Shortly thereafter Louis and Sarah were married. Barely nine months
after the wedding, at the height of a thunderstorm, I was born in
Coney Island Hospital.

My father's hands described what that frightful day had been like.
His hands appeared to be warding off something. Something unknown
that caused fear. "It was a dreadful day," he signed, throwing out
his hands from alongside his temples. "'Awful!'"

It was the hottest day of the summer. All of Brooklyn lay stunned
beneath the heat. The angry sun had baked the sands of Coney Island
and turned the blue Atlantic into a sea of molten red. At dusk the
boiling sun continued on its way from Brooklyn to California, taking
with it the light but leaving behind the heat.

My father's hands told me how he paced the grimy linoleum floor of
the hospital. From end to end in the airless hallway he measured off
his steps: one hundred one way, one hundred back again. And with
each step he signed to himself his frustration and his fear.

Back and forth, back and forth, past his wife's room, past the
weeping walls, he walked his endless circle of anxiety. He had been
doing this for ten hours, ever since his wife had been admitted
after her waters broke so shockingly, signaling the impending birth
of their first child.

My father had no thought for the child who was taking his time to
arrive, only for his wife, lying on sweat-drenched sheets, in a room
he was not permitted to enter, from which few if any news bulletins
came his way.

Some time after the sun set a cold front suddenly moved in over
Brooklyn, bringing with it a drop of forty degrees in temperature.
The cold air rear-ended the darkening boiling mass in its path.
Lightning split the sky, and rain fell in cold torrents onto the
steaming asphalt streets of Coney Island. Day turned to darkest
night.

Soon the tar-topped street outside the hospital was filled from curb
to curb with the rising tide of water. The sewers could not handle
the overflow, and the water backed up, rising quickly above the
hubcaps of the parked cars, flowing down neighboring cellar steps.
The violent electric storm spawned winds that toppled trees and tore
down telephone poles, while five floors above my father continued
his solitary pacing, wondering how he could possibly exist in a
world without his deaf wife, Sarah.

Lightning struck oil tanks in New Jersey, sending flames hundreds of
feet into the sky, turning night back into blazing day; and the wind
tore down a circus tent in Queens, trapping four hundred people
beneath the rain-drenched canvas. All the windows of Brooklyn went
dark as power lines fell like matchsticks, and my father became a
father.

"I rushed out into the storm raising my fist to the heavens," his
hands told me. "I was a crazy man. A Niagara of water submerged me,
and all about bolts of lightning splintered the sky."

Over the crashing sounds of this Olympian tumult, my father's deaf
voice cried out, "'God, make my son hear!'"