The 12-year-old girl who became my mother took weekly piano lessons. This happened along the Grand Concourse in the Bronx in the 1930s. She practiced at the keyboard until she could finally play a Johann Strauss waltz straight through without a mistake.
My mother also took tap dance lessons in a studio near her home. She would glide across a gleaming hardwood floor, her arms all aflutter, clacking her heels away to some catchy Cole Porter melody.
So far so good. But the first time I heard about this cultural education, it struck me as strange, largely because of an inescapable fact: Aileen Roslyn Sheft was by then profoundly deaf. She was stricken with spinal meningitis, in an epidemic outbreak in 1929, shortly after she turned a year old.
Why such theatrical lessons? I once asked this of my nana, her mother, the former Gertrude Goldberg. Why would my mother train to play piano and tap-dance despite being unable to hear music and thus performing in silence? How could she either stay on key and hit the right notes or move in rhythm to the beat? It seemed far-fetched, almost a bad joke, a charade close to cruel.
Besides, how must my mother have felt, I wondered to myself, playing piano and dancing even though she was deaf? Maybe, I suspected, she felt even more self-conscious than she would otherwise, unable to see the point of disguising her disability and perpetuating a falsehood. Why, Mother? I imagined her asking. Why do you make me do this?
“Aileen had no real interest in taking the lessons,” my nana explained to me. “But I wanted to give her the feeling that she was as good as all the hearing girls in the class.”
“She once danced in a show and kept perfect step,” Nana said. “She could feel the music vibrate through the floor underneath her feet. Afterwards, the teacher went on the stage and announced to the audience, ‘The little girl you just saw dance is deaf. She heard none of the music being played.’
“It made your mother feel very important to take those bows.”
As my nana recounted this episode, she broke into tears.
How must my grandmother have delighted in watching my mother play piano and dance, then, thrilled in the illusion thereby conjured of a daughter equipped with ears that functioned perfectly. My beautiful little daughter is as good as any of the other girls on the Grand Concourse, my nana must have told herself in those transcendent moments. No one even realizes she’s deaf.
Maybe, despite my original suspicions, my mother actually wound up feeling just as her mother intended her to feel, in every respect equal.
So it went with my nana. She saw to it that her firstborn child, though disabled, was afforded every opportunity to grow up on a level playing field. My grandparents enrolled my mother, at age 3, in New York City’s finest private institution for deaf people — Helen Keller previously attended it — so she could learn to speak well and read lips. They borrowed what then amounted to a fortune to pay tuition and boarding costs.
Back then, in the depths of the Great Depression, being deaf still ranked as a stigma. All too many deaf children were incorrectly diagnosed as mentally disabled, only to be relegated to languish, often utterly forgotten, in state institutions. Deaf people were almost automatically assumed to be stupid — hence the term “deaf and dumb.” They were routinely ridiculed, barred from taking on even the simplest of jobs, and turned into outcasts.
My nana initiated a campaign to combat this potential alienation and prevent Aileen from growing up feeling inferior. She committed to doing everything in her power that she imagined would enable her daughter to feel normal.
And so it was that years later, my mother played that Strauss waltz for me without missing a note. And I did what she could no longer do with any sound, much less music. I listened.
Bob Brody, a consultant and essayist living in Italy, is the author of “Playing Catch With Strangers: A Family Guy (Reluctantly) Comes of Age.”
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