Singing Hands Read online

  Then, if we were really feeling devious, we would stop signing and strike up a regular conversation in loud voices, jabbering away over our malted milk shakes, just to let all those people know we had heard every word they said.

  But now that she was in high school, Margaret felt as if she had outgrown our old game. "Should I go get Mother?" she threatened quietly.

  Nell ignored her. "Does the boy have red hair, too?" she signed back to me.

  I swooped my head back and forth. "Oh, no. Black as coal. And eyes as blue as big, fat blueberries." I didn't know the signs for coal and blueberries, so I made a big show of fingerspelling.

  Over Nell's shoulder, the girls were still staring, whispering about us behind their cupped hands. I was just getting ready to give Nell another report when I noticed a man at the next table watching me. My heart fluttered in my chest. I recognized him. He was the man from church, the tall one with the striped bow tie. I remembered him talking with Daddy and suddenly realized that, for the last five minutes, I had been signing about the frog-eyed twins and their cute brother, and he must have been reading my signs all along.

  "Oh, no," I croaked, reaching for my water glass.

  "What is it?" whispered Nell.

  "It's the man."

  "What man?" Margaret asked, craning her neck over her shoulder.

  "Don't look now," I ordered under my breath.

  But to my horror, the man was already rising to his feet and coming toward us. He reached our table just as Mother returned from the bathroom. She had powdered her face and composed herself again.

  The man touched Mother's shoulder, stopping her before she sat down. "Pardon me," he signed. "I wanted to introduce myself. I was at your husband's service this morning."

  Mother smiled and nodded, making a small, pleasant noise in her throat. Then the man began to speak as he signed. His voice didn't sound nasal or muffled—not at all like a deaf person's voice. "I've heard so much about Reverend Davis and followed his work over the years. Today I finally came to see Saint Jude's for myself and ask for your help."

  Then he looked directly at me and said, "I've sat through many church services in my time, but never one quite like today's.... The musical solo was especially impressive."

  Chapter 3

  My humming days were over.

  By the time I heard the back screen door bang shut when Daddy came home that afternoon, the truth about what I had done was out. I didn't move. I had spent the last two hours sprawled across my bumpy chenille bedspread, still in my church clothes, waiting for the fan to blow in my direction and for bits of news from downstairs. Nell had been running up with reports every twenty minutes or so.

  Now she practically skidded into our bedroom in her sock feet. She closed the door behind her and leaned against it, still huffing from taking the back steps two at a time.

  "Daddy's home," she announced ominously.

  "I know. I heard the door."

  "Mother hasn't told him yet. They're arguing about Daddy's traveling again."

  I sat up in bed hopefully. "Really?"

  Nell nodded. "Mother says she doesn't care how rich that Mr. Snider from Britling's is or how much money he gives to Saint Jude's. She says Daddy can't possibly add another mission to his list. The church will just have to get somebody else."

  "Good." I flopped back on my pillow. Then I popped up again. "But didn't she mention anything about the new car Mr. Snider offered? If Daddy had a car, he wouldn't have to take the train everywhere."

  Nell frowned down at me. "I left before they got to that."

  I saw her catch a glimpse of her face in the mirror that hung over the dresser between our twin beds. She licked her finger and rubbed at the crease that had appeared between her delicate eyebrows. Then, still gazing at the mirror, she turned her head sideways and fluffed up the light brown curls that swung around her cheeks.

  "Stop primping and go see what else they're saying.... Please?"

  Nell sighed and reluctantly turned from the mirror. "Oh, all right. But you owe me two nights of dish duty for this."

  I snorted impatiently. "Fine."

  After Nell had gone, I scooted to the edge of the bed and plucked my wrinkled blouse away from my damp back, then refastened my barrettes. Maybe Mother would be so upset thinking about Daddy's schedule that she'd forget all about my humming.

  What wife wouldn't be upset? Daddy was home only one full week a month. The rest of the time he was ministering to deaf people in nine states across the South. Gadsden, Alabama ... St. Augustine, Florida ... Meridian, Mississippi ... Morganton, North Carolina ... I couldn't even remember all the towns where my father preached. And whenever he was away, it was Mother who had to run things at Saint Jude's.

  And now Mr. Moneybags Snider in his striped bow tie wanted Daddy to add another town to his list: Macon, Georgia, way off near the middle of the state. Mr. Snider was the son of deaf parents, he had told us right in the middle of Britling's. But even though they were deaf, they had raised him well, he said—so well that he now owned a chain of top-of-the-line furniture stores spread across Georgia and Alabama. He wanted to repay his parents by helping to start a church for the deaf in Macon. "Oh, how my dear mother would love to see that deaf choir signing 'Nearer, My God, to Thee'!" Mr. Snider had exclaimed with tears spilling down his cheeks.

  I stepped in front of the mirror and tried to puff my dark hair around my face like Nell's, but it fell in lank clumps to my shoulders. I sighed. I had planned for a transformation in my appearance to occur before I started South Glen Junior High School in the fall. But time was running out. Although I diligently applied Vanish Freckle Fading Creme every night, my freckles hadn't seemed to fade one bit, and my eyebrows were hopeless, stretched out in a fuzzy caterpillar line straight across my brow. Every time I asked Margaret if she would help me tweeze them into pretty arches like hers, she would smirk and say something like, "I'll have to put that on my calendar. Those monsters are gonna take two or three hours, at least."

  I leaned closer to the mirror, inspecting more carefully. At least I didn't have eyebrows like our upstairs renter Mrs. Fernley. Hers were so sparse she had to fill them in with a brown pencil that left her with two sharp arcs across her brow and a permanent look of surprise. I cocked my head up at the ceiling, listening. She was playing her opera again, just as she had on Sunday afternoons ever since Mother and Daddy had decided to take in roomers last year. I was sure Mrs. Fernley had chosen our house because my parents were deaf and she could play records on her phonograph as loud as she wanted.

  Besides being an opera lover, Mrs. Fernley was a divorcee—another fact that made us all a little suspicious, although she was at least fifty and never entertained gentlemen callers. "I enjoy my freedom," I had heard her tell Daddy firmly when she first came to see the room. "The ability to come and go as I please is a luxury that was not possible during my years of marriage."

  I couldn't help making fun of the way Mrs. Fernley talked. She spoke as if she might aspire to have a British accent instead of the Southern drawl the rest of us had. At first I thought she spoke in that prim way to help Daddy with lip reading. Then, after several months of listening to her careful enunciation, I decided she was just plain prissy.

  She dressed just as carefully as she spoke. Every morning she tip-tapped down our front walkway at eight-twenty to catch the streetcar for downtown Birmingham, where she worked as the chief millinery buyer for Blach's department store. I was fascinated that an adult could have such a job—picking out hats for eight hours each day, week after week. Whenever I could, I rushed to peek out Margaret's window just to see the smart hats or tailored suits Mrs. Fernley wore to work each day.

  Then there were the strange odors that wafted down from upstairs whenever she cooked on her hot plate—smoky, musky smells of exotic spices that clung to our clothes and reminded me of the time I stuck my nose in the clove jar when Mother was baking a ham for Christmas.

  Mother had a bird-dog sense
of smell, and if Mrs. Fernley happened to be cooking, she knew it immediately, even if she was all the way down in our kitchen at the back of the house. She crinkled up her nostrils and pursed her lips with distaste. "Curry!" She spelled out the letters harshly with her fingers, then swept her hands through a scornful combination of signs. "She must have foreign blood."

  Just as I was getting ready to apply another layer of freckle-fading cream to the bridge of my nose, Nell burst through the door again.

  "Mother told him."

  I cringed. "What'd he say?"

  "Not much ... that is, until they called Margaret in and Daddy asked her to tell him the names of all the songs you've ever hummed in church."

  "All of them?" I moaned.

  "Yep. She even told him about that time you hummed 'Happy Birthday' during the nativity play at Christmas when Mary put Baby Jesus in the manger."

  "Gah!" I cried. "That stinking tattletoad Margaret! Did she really have to tell him that, too?"

  Nell tried not to smile. I was famous for inventing catchy new insults like "tattletoad." "Daddy wants to see you in his office, Gussie. He sent me up to get you."

  I crossed my arms over my chest, plunked myself down on the edge of the bed, and stared stubbornly out at the green shimmer of catalpa leaves just beyond our window.

  "You better go on, Gus," Nell said, coming to sit beside me. "Don't worry. How bad can it be? Daddy's so soft, the worst he'll do is probably make you pick dandelions for a couple days."

  "Oh, boy," I mumbled, stuffing my feet back into my scuffed oxfords. Once or twice a summer Daddy got it into his head that we needed to decapitate the hundreds of dandelions in our yard, removing the yellow heads by hand before they went to seed and made a hundred more dandelions.

  But the thought of what my punishment would be wasn't occupying my mind nearly as much as how I could get back at that goody two-shoes, two-faced, two-timing Margaret.

  Chapter 4

  "Good luck," Nell called as I trudged down the hall. I glanced into Margaret's room as I passed. "Jeez," I growled. Just looking at her perfect room infuriated me. I could have gone on and on, listing in my head all the things about Margaret's room that made my blood boil.

  1. Penmanship and spelling-bee ribbons tucked into the corners of her mirror. All first or second place.

  2. Stuffed lamb, BaBa, always propped neatly against her pillow. Of course he still had his two button eyes and velvety ears even though he was as old as she was.

  3. Arrangement of never-overdue library books by her bed. One neat "recently read" stack on one side. One "still-in-progress" stack on the other.

  4. Clear view of the front walkway from large set of double windows with flouncy tieback curtains. Perfect for seeing Mrs. Fernley's latest outfits and spying on the neighbors.

  5. Double bed instead of a twin. Plus big, breezy bedroom three feet eight inches wider than the one her sisters had to share.

  I stopped listing as the sound of Mrs. Fernley's music grew louder. She always turned the volume up for her favorite parts. Now a woman's silvery, mournful voice floated down the dark staircase from the third floor, where Daddy kept his office across the hall from our two renters.

  I took my time on the narrow stairs, feeling the temperature rise and hearing the notes climb higher with each step. I had to admit, opera was growing on me a little. I even recognized this one—Madame Butterfly. Mrs. Fernley had been thrilled when I asked her the name of it as we passed in the hall one day. She had closed her eyes and sighed, gathering her thoughts, then gone on and on in a trembly voice for nearly ten minutes about "Puccini's masterpiece." I could hear her now behind her door, crooning along with the record.

  I paused at the next room down the hall, Grace Homewood's. It was a lucky thing for Miss Grace that she was deaf—in case she didn't care for opera. I pressed my ear against her door to listen. Silence, as usual.

  Miss Grace had moved in last year, too, just a week after Mrs. Fernley. Still, I barely knew a thing about her, mainly because she was hardly ever home. She worked at the downtown public library six days a week, shelving and checking out books. And every Sunday her stern-faced hearing parents came over from Mountain Brook, the rich side of town, to take their daughter out to their church and for an afternoon meal. But even when she came home at night, Miss Grace was as quiet as the hushed rows of books at the library where she worked.

  I suppose that, besides being deaf, she had good reason to be quiet. Miss Grace was a war widow—a fact that seemed especially unfair considering she was only twenty-four years old and the prettiest woman I had ever seen outside of fashion magazines. Her husband had been shot straight through the heart. It had happened three years ago during World War II, on Okinawa Island near Japan. On the day Miss Grace moved into our house, I caught a glimpse of her husband's photograph when I was helping to carry her boxes upstairs. Corporal Homewood stared out from a silver filigree frame nestled in one corner of a cardboard carton, looking fearless and handsome in his crisp Marine Corps uniform.

  Nell and I were constantly begging Mother to tell us every tantalizing detail she might know about the Homewoods. But Mother claimed she knew only two things: Corporal James Homewood had been a hearing man, and he had left for the Pacific just two months after their honeymoon.

  At night Nell and I loved to lie in our beds and speculate about Miss Grace's tragic life. Nell fantasized that maybe James wasn't dead but just missing in action somewhere, and any day he might recover from his case of amnesia, find his way home, and come striding up our front walk to retrieve his lovely bride. One night Nell even talked me into turning the lights back on and acting out the couple's reunion. Naturally, I had to play the part of the corporal. When Mother opened the door to find Nell sobbing in my arms, covering me with kisses, she just shook her head and went to bed.

  "Augusta?"

  I flinched, jerking away from Miss Grace's room. Daddy was standing across the hall in the doorway of his office, watching me. He must have felt the vibration of my footsteps on the stairs. Augusta. He always called me by my proper name, which I hated. The only thing I liked about it was that I was named after him—William Augustus Davis III.

  "Come sit," Daddy said, motioning me into his office. I could barely hear his voice over the opera music. While Daddy spoke much more clearly than Mother, his deafness always made him sound as if he was straining to get the words out, as if he was constantly recovering from a bad case of laryngitis. "Just a minute," he said, settling himself behind his clunky Smith Corona typewriter. "I just need to..." His raspy voice trailed off as he pecked away at the stiff keys, already lost in thought.

  If my father wasn't preaching or traveling, he was typing—letters or to-do lists or his next sermon. I plopped down in the cracked leather chair beside his desk to wait. I was glad to sit near the turret of open windows, even though there was barely enough breeze to ruffle the pages of the open Bible or the stacks of papers piled around the desk.

  Daddy's office would have been my favorite room in the house except for the fact that it was broiling in the summer and freezing in winter. Like lots of Victorian homes in Birmingham, ours had a round tower that rose along one side of the house and was topped by a pointy, dunce-cap roof. Downstairs, the half-tower in Mother and Daddy's bedroom and in the parlor below were ringed with window seats facing an old crape myrtle tree. Although the tower in Daddy's office wasn't fitted with a seat, you could stand at the wraparound windows, look out over the crape myrtle branches, and see all the way over to Vulcan—Birmingham's most famous statue.

  Vulcan was the Roman god of fire and metalworking, and years back some business leaders in town had decided we needed our very own Vulcan to honor all the iron and steel mills in town. If those businessmen had studied Roman myths like we did at South Glen Primary, they might have changed their minds. Vulcan was powerful, but he was also lame and ugly. Now a giant, not-very-handsome statue loomed in cast iron at the top of Red Mountain, keeping watch over Bir
mingham sprawled below.

  Surely, Vulcan would have approved of the temperature in my father's office. I could feel the backs of my knees sticking to the leather seat cushion. Finally, I thumped my foot on the floor to get Daddy's attention. He looked up at me, his gray eyes glazed with concentration.

  "Aren't you too hot up here, Daddy?" I asked, swiping my fingers across my brow to make the sign for "hot." The smell of dust and carbon paper and old typewriter ribbons hung over the room like a worn blanket.

  Daddy shook his head. He was still in long shirtsleeves, with his stiff clerical collar fastened tightly around his neck. But like always, he looked cool as marble as he peered at me from behind his spectacles.

  "Hmmmmmmmm," he began suddenly. "Hmmmmmmmmmmm..."

  I could feel my eyes grow rounder. Daddy was trying to hum. But of course, it was a tuneless hum. How would he know how to carry a tune if he hadn't heard music—or any other sound—since he was a boy?

  Then he stopped just as suddenly as he'd begun. "Is that a godly sound, Augusta?"

  I stared back at Daddy blankly.

  "Is it?" he asked again. "Is it a beautiful or holy or respectful sound? Is it a sound worthy of Saint Jude's sanctuary?"

  "No, sir," I said.

  Daddy stared at my lips, waiting for more explanation. When nothing came, he made the sign I had been waiting for. He touched his forehead with his fingers, then brought his fist toward me with his thumb and his pinkie stretched in the shape of a Y.

  "Why?" he asked out loud.

  I couldn't tell Daddy why. He was too good. All around us, fastened on the cracked plaster walls, were dozens of photographs of deaf people he had helped—couples he had introduced and married, men standing in front of the printing press or factory line where Daddy had found them jobs, war veterans who had lost their hearing in battle and who my father had visited in the hospital day after day.