Shall I Say A Kiss?: The Courtship Letters of a Deaf Couple, 1936-1938

Epilogue: The Ever After

[PILOGU{ The Ever After Lennard[. Davis he letters end with Eva, full of excitement and a bit of fear about the wedding, setting sail on the SSScythia. After all the obstacles and setbacks, she must have felt certain of the course she was charting. She had overcome her doubts about Morris, her uncertainties about leaving her family, the discriminatory barriers presented by the immigration bureaucracies , and the difficulties of travel and relocation. She was set on reuniting with her fiance and getting married to him. She arrived in late August and was married on September 9, 1938. Morris and Eva moved into a one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx near Jerome Avenue. Gerald Julius Davis, their first son, was born on October 14, 1939. Morris continued to work as a sewing-machine operator in the garment district . Eva took in alteration work at home. Morris went on racewalking and remained part of the 92nd Street YMHA's track and fieldteam until his death. Both Eva and Morris were active participants in the Hebrew Association of the Deaf and the Union League of the Deaf. They had many friends in the New York City area. In the 1940s they moved to Clinton Avenue in the Bronx, and on September 16, 1949, I was born. In our household, signing was natural and deafness was Eva's wedding portrait. The Ever After 165 normal. My parents spoke to us in what has been called "simultaneous communication," speaking and signing at the same time. My brother and I picked up sign language in a natural way. Wespoke to our parents using both sign and speech simultaneously , and funnily enough, our voices mimicked theirs, especially our mother's Liverpudlian accent. Since she had become deafpostlingually, she was the one whose verbal patterns we imitated. Morris's speech was more guttural and forced. Much of our lives was intertwined with the Deaf club and Deaf friends. We went to the Hebrew Association of the Deaf, then on 85th Street in Manhattan, where we watched captioned films, played with other CODA children, and participated in Hanukkah parties, magic shows, and the like. Unlike many Deaf people, both my parents enjoyed having hearing friends. So we did not feel isolated within the Deaf world but moved freely between the two realms. For us, our parents' deafness was not remarkable. Deaf culture inside and outside the home was the way life was. On the other hand, I was acutely aware of the way the hearing world then considered the Deaf world. I fought with some of my friends when they made fun of the way my parents spoke. I glared at people on the subway who stared at my parents when they were engaged in sign language conversations. I saw it as my role to defend my parents against the discrimination of the world. At the same time, I wanted very much to enter that world. So I felt both the desire to flee deafness and the guilt for wanting to do so. Now, especially in putting together this collection, I feelI can rejoin my parents and the Deaf world in a way that makes sense to me as I enter a half-century of being alive. Before continuing, I have to let the reader know that Gerald and Lenny. Morris (left) with 92nd St. YMHA teammates in the 1960s. The Ever After 167 there was one letter from my father to my mother that was never sent. I learned about it when I was about ten or eleven years old. As my mother was ironing in the kitchen, with her back to us, my father decided, in his characteristically abrupt way, to tell me about the past. He said that just when Eva was about to come over on the SSScythia, he had sudden misgivings . He told me how as a young man he had contracted a case of the mumps, and how when the illness was over, one testicle had atrophied. He was concerned that he was no longer fertile and decided that he had to tell Eva this in a letter before she came to marry him.1 Dutifully, he wrote the letter and dropped it in the mailbox. Immediately, he was seized with grave doubts. He sensed the finality of what he had done, and thought that he had jeopardized his...