In Silence: Growing Up Hearing in a Deaf World

6. Mary and Benny, a Love Story

6 Mary and Benny, a Love Story . . . Let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; For sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely. —Song of Songs, : Iwatched my mother tell me of her mother’s sudden illness and death.“She too young to be so sick, to die. She was thirtynine years old, and me only nineteen years to lose a mother.” And I remember thinking as I had done through my girlhood that mothers were for mourning. My mother mourned her mother all her life. My mother tapped me on the shoulder, signaling for my attention , recognizing that I had wandered into my own thoughts. “I went up to a bedroom, early in the morning to wake up my mother Fanny. We needed her to get ready all of us, for work and school, I touched her shoulder to wake her up. She would not get up, stayed still in the bed, a blanket pulling up over her face. I called my father Abraham to come and he could not wake her up. We did not know, but she had a stroke. Her corner of her mouth  was pushed over to one side, she could not speak. She could not make a sign to me.” Abraham called for an ambulance and Fanny was rushed to Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn. When the hospital could do no more for my grandmother, when they realized there was no hope my mother said, “They send her to ‘crazy house,’ a prison for sick people who waved arms and screamed. My father and me, we went into her room, woman nurse open a door with a key. She was locked in. We saw her lying in a bed. She was quiet and smile at us with a twisted face.” The asylum decided not to keep her there, and the staff informed my grandfather that she would be sent to a welfare hospital for the incurably ill. Abraham, opposed to this, searched until he found a small private hospital in Brooklyn , the Unity Hospital on Sterling Street. There my grandmother was placed in pleasant surroundings with lace curtains at the window and a pretty pink coverlet for her wasting body. They took turns at her bedside, day and night; someone was always there. During the last week of her life, on that last Wednesday, when it was my mother’s turn to sit by Fanny’s side, she was so busy with household tasks that she sent Jack in her place. Jack came back after his vigil and said, “Momma does not wake up!” She had lapsed into a coma. By Saturday she was dead. She never regained consciousness. My mother paused in her telling and signed slowly, “She died on the Sabbath, same as my father when he die in , when you were ten years old. Shame you never know my mother Fanny, she was good to me, to all people. So kind. Never said a bad word to me, never punish me, never. I always call her Fanny, she did not turn around when I call her Momma. Only Fanny.” Tears slipped down her cheeks as she mourned once more, although more than fifty years had passed. Mary and Benny, a Love Story   The World of My Parents “There were no funeral chapels, then, like now,” my mother said.“They bring Fanny home and we called women to come and make her ready for the grave.” The women washed her, laid her on the floor, wrapped in a white shroud, placed seven candles around her body, and sat with her through the night. “When at first I see my mother I scream to see her so still, gone for always. So long time ago, I never forget Fanny.” The next day, Sunday, March , , they placed her in a simple pine box and draped the coffin in a black cloth with Hebrew lettering. The coffin was placed in a hearse. The chauffeur drove slowly around the Brooklyn block as Fanny’s children and her husband followed on foot. A final farewell. She was buried on Staten Island. “I remember her just like she was here, now with you and me in this room, as I tell you my stories. She never hear me talk with normal voice, but she would be proud to hear my children talk, you and Freddie.” At that she smiled...