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on his hearing child.
    Further compounding my confusion, in my guise as presumptive adult I often felt invisible. My father had programmed me to be a mere conduit for communication when I was interpreting for him: he spoke not to me but through me, like a pane of glass.
    Dizzying as all that was, the moment my father did not need my trick, the roles were suddenly flipped around, and once again I was the child.
    These polarizing reversals, so sudden and complete, were unnerving for me. One minute I was struggling with comprehending and deciphering, then translating and interpreting the adult concepts that had been communicated to me by hearing grownups. The very next minute my father was ordering me to be still, to stop jumping around, and to stop fidgeting—and telling me that a boy must always mind his father. Then he would gently but firmly take my small hand in his, and we would walk away from the hearing world, and I would be once again just what I was, his little boy.
     
     
    A s I grew older, my job as interpreter increased in complexity, and so did my feelings about it. My father continued to take me with him every Saturday morning to do the week’s shopping, and I still felt a sense of pride about his reliance on me. But in time I became increasingly sensitive to the harsh reality of the prejudice and scorn that the hearing world levied at my deaf father.
    Older still, as I deepened into the role of being my father’s voice, I would note with despair and shame, and then anger, the way in which the hearing would ignore him as if he were nothing more than an inanimate, insensate block of stone, something not quite human. This sheer indifference seemed even worse than contempt.
    On many occasions I witnessed a hearing stranger approach my father on the street and ask him a question: “Can you tell me the way to the subway?” “What time is it?” “Where is the closest bakery?”
    I was never able to get used to the initial look of incomprehension that bloomed on the stranger’s face when my father failed to answer, and the way that look turned to shock at the sound of his harsh voice announcing his deafness, then metastasized into revulsion, at which point the stranger would turn and flee as if my father’s deafness were a contagious disease.
    Even now, seventy long years in the future, the memory of the shame I sometimes felt as a child is as corrosive as battery acid in my veins, and bile rises unbidden in my throat.
    One day we were in the local butcher shop. As usual on a Saturday, it was crowded. My father told me to ask the butcher for five pounds of rib roast. “Tell the butcher man, no fat!” he added firmly.
    “My father wants five pounds of rib roast. No fat,” I said to the butcher when we got to the head of the line.
    “I’m busy, kid,” he said, not even bothering to look at my father.
    “Tell him you’ll have to wait your turn.”
    “What did he say?” my father asked me.
    “He said we have to wait our turn.”
    “But it is our turn. Tell the man to wait on us. Now!”
    “My father says it’s our turn now. He would like a five-pound rib roast, and no fat.”
    I added politely, “Please, mister.”
    “Tell the dummy I’ll say when it’s his turn. Now get to the back of the line, or get the hell out of my store.”
    The line of restless shoppers now stood as statues, frozen in their places, staring with blank, unfeeling eyes.
    “What did the man say?” my father asked me.
    Above all else my father had taught me that I must never, ever edit what hearing people directed at him, no matter what they said. He wanted it straight. Thus I signed, “ The man says you’re a dummy, ” while a roaring furnace burned within my six-year-old body, almost blistering my skin.
    I had never heard anyone call my father a dummy before. The only time I had ever heard the word was on the radio during the Charlie McCarthy show, when Edgar Bergen called Charlie a dummy. “Charlie, you’re a dummy.