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192 pages, Hardcover
First published April 1, 1987
Late for an appointment in midtown, I run down the subway stairs just as the train is pulling into the Fourteenth Street station. The doors open and a young man standing in front of me (T-shirt, jeans, crew cut) with an elaborately folded-up baby carriage on his back, leading a very small child by the hand, heads for Late for an appointment in midtown, I run down the subway stairs just as the train is pulling into the seats directly ahead of us. I plop down on the one opposite him, take out my book and reading glasses, and, settling myself, am vaguely aware of the man removing the carriage from his back and turning toward the seated child. Then I look up. The little boy is about seven or eight, and he is the most grotesquely deformed child I have ever seen. He has the face of a gargoyle—mouth twisted to the side, one eye higher than the other—inside a huge, misshapen head that reminds me of the Elephant Man. Bound around the child’s neck is a narrow piece of white cloth, in the center of which sits a short, fat tube that seems to be inserted into his throat. In another instant I realize that he is also deaf. This last because the man immediately begins signing. At first, the boy merely watches the man’s moving fingers, but soon he begins responding with motions of his own. Then, as the man’s fingers move more and more rapidly, the boy’s quicken, and within minutes both sets of fingers are matched in speed and complexity.
Embarrassed at first to be watching these two so steadily, I keep turning away, but they are so clearly oblivious to everyone around them that I can’t resist looking up repeatedly from my book. And then something remarkable happens: the man’s face is suffused with such delight and affection as the boy’s responses grow ever more animated—the twisted little mouth grinning, the unaligned eyes brightening—that the child himself begins to look transformed. As the stations go by, and the conversation between the man and the boy grows ever more absorbing to them, fingers flying, both nodding and laughing, I find myself thinking, These two are humanizing each other at a very high level.
By the time we get to Fifty-Ninth Street, the boy looks beautiful to me, and the man beatific.