Sunday in the Park
by Harry Reynolds
[ people - february 09 ]
When I was ten, I was a translator for my lip-reading, deaf mother who frequently needed me to inform her of what someone was attempting to say to her. My skill at doing so involved not only verbal precision but the dramatic use of my face and hands as accompaniments of the movements of my lips. Generally, my services involved passing on ordinary observations of butchers, grocers, and neighbors, or the sympathetic inquiries of priests and nuns. On occasion, however, a stranger would ask me to translate something odd, something that would startle me and cause my mother to make those sounds that the naturally deaf make when alarmed.
Once on a Sunday in that summer, when my mind had not yet broken through its hidden caul, when music was first heard, magical sounding words first read, feelings first felt, brimming over my chest and signaling a heaven not yet found, on such a day my mother and I were sitting on a bench in Tompkins Square Park.
A deranged, crying drunk approached my mother and begged for a dime. She looked at me. I translated his plea and, with a flash, she warded him off with a swing of her pocket book. He stumbled and fell on his seat. He got up and circled us slowly to advance towards me with an extended hand, tears running down his dirty face. I felt so sorry for him that I dug into my pocket and gave him the dime my mother had just given me after Mass that morning. My mother turned to me and said angrily, in our private silent language of signs and lips and facial movements, "There's something about you that attracts crazy people". Pointing at her, I said, laughingly, "You're right", whereupon she slammed the pocketbook on my head.
We got up, she adjusted her dress, fixed her hair at its sides with a petting motion of both her hands in a way women no longer do, and, winking at me, took my hand as we both walked through an explosion of pigeons that were in our way. I glanced sideways at her. She was indeed beautiful, and knew it in a modest way. As we walked, I glanced again and saw in her lifted chin and high cheekbones the hard face of the people from whom she had descended. I knew that I loved her but yet would never do so warmly, for that drunk had drawn a line between my mother and me, leaving her on one side and the drunk and me on the other.
