Deafening

by Frances Itani

  She folds and pats two sets of long woollen drawers for winter, and one Swiss-ribbed top. In Payson’s Indelible Ink, her name is printed inside each item of clothing. She inspects her horn comb, her olive-wood brush, the photo of Mamo lying flat in her drawer—she does not want anyone but herself to look at Mamo. She holds the hand mirror given to her by Tress and stares into it and says words of her oral homework. She fastens a nib to her pen and dips the nib in ink and writes out her letters. She makes neat words and sentences and reads what she has copied from lines Miss Amos wrote across the board during Friday’s class. She sits on the edge of her bed and lifts her Sunday book to her lap and turns the pages. She invents her own caption: Dulcie was an orphan who lived at the school the rest of her days.

  After supper, when it is time for lights out, she lies stiffly on her back and keeps her eyes wide open in the dark. When her eyes adjust to the beam of light that slides under the door, she turns on her side and looks around. Some of the girls are older, twelve and thirteen. Each is aware of the word quiet, the word used by hearing teachers and staff, but never by the children.

  Who cares? Nola once signed to Grania. Who cares about quiet? Noise is something that is present during the hours of light. It is the quiet of hearing persons that rules the dark. Every girl in the dorm has learned quiet through warnings, in the same way that Grania learned quiet at home when she tiptoed across the rag rug.

  Nola stirs from her bed in the corner. Every night after the house mother shuts the door, she slides out from beneath the covers, kneels on the floor and prays. Grania can see her lips in the dim streak of light. Nola always says the same prayer: Please God, don’t let me wake up blind.

  Nola has told Grania that at home, after she became deaf, her mother wakened her every morning and asked, “Can you see?” Every morning, a different object was held up for Nola to identify—a thimble, a spoon, a doily, a cup. Nola has been asked so many times if she can see, she is now terrified that she will go blind.

  Across from Nola is Bridie with the heart-shaped face. She wears her hair loosely pulled back and held in place with hairpins that she is forever losing. During the day, she is the liveliest of all the girls, but at night she pulls the covers over her head and refuses to look out again until morning. And Erma is there. Erma who never stops talking—with voice—to herself and to everyone else who cannot hear.

  Grace is not totally deaf; she has a low level of hearing. But Grace’s biggest wish is to have no hearing at all. She tells the others that in articulation class, her teacher nags her: “Blow your nose, clear the passages. Feel the pressure in your ear canals. Listen to your sounds.” She is supposed to find the place in her ears where she is deaf.

  “How do I know where I’m deaf?” her hands ask Grania. “Teacher says: Swallow, listen, blow your nose. That’s supposed to tell me where I’m deaf in my ears. But if there is other noise in the room, I don’t hear anything. And there is always noise in the room.”

  But Grace knows how to use her voice. The others watch and know that she is the best speaker of them all. She arrived at school when she was eleven and tried to leave the same day she arrived. As she wasn’t allowed to leave, she learned what she had to do, and this is the part of the story Grania likes best.

  Grace taught herself to turn off sound. Listening with a tiny bit of hearing makes her so tired, she has taught herself, instead, to be deaf. She has learned to fall into her own silence—the place where Grania and the others live without choice. And Grace knows how to stay there. While she was learning to be deaf, she stuffed cotton down her ear canals and then braided her hair and pinned a circle of braid over each ear so the teachers wouldn’t see. She has tried everything she can think of to block the entry of sound.

  Celia is a long-necked girl who pretends to be fearless, but Grania knows—as do the others in the dorm—that every morning at the same time, eleven-thirty, just before dinner, Celia walks into the girls’ washroom to have a cry behind the door. After three or four minutes, she wipes her eyes, comes out and catches up to her class in the dining hall, where she can be seen laughing and using the sign language with her friends. But first, she has to have her daily cry. It is Celia who complains to Grania that no one checks their dormitory at night. Miss O’Shaughnessy sleeps in her own room down the hall. “Everyone thinks we are sleeping, but we could be dead,” Celia says, flipping a palm to make the sign for dead.

  But Grania is not worried about being dead. Grania is worried about the dark. She hates the dark. She keeps her eyes open as long as she can. She thinks of what Tress told her at home. I tell my brain to stop thinking, and then I go to sleep. She tries not to miss Tress. But she can’t help herself; she misses her every moment. She misses Tress telling her what is going on. She misses the language of the ankle rope and the gentle tugs that anchor her to her sister’s bed. Grania remembers her talk with Father and, from the unfamiliar mattress, she begins to list her fears aloud.

  Don’t let me live here forever.

  Don’t let them lock the big doors.

  Don’t let me be an orphan.

  Let me go home again.

  Don’t let me live here forever.

  Don’t let me be an orphan.

  Let me go home again.

  She chants to herself, her fingertips tapping the side of her leg as she throws her fears out into the dark. She inches her body down into the bed and even deeper into the place where her silence lies, the place where she is safe.

  In the middle of winter, Fry—her real name Freda—is led to the dormitory. Pupil number 272, Fry attended school earlier in the United States and has now moved to Ontario with her parents, Canadians returning to Toronto, where they were born. During their trip back, they have dropped Fry off in Belleville, along the way. Fry, deaf from meningitis since age four, lost her hearing and her spoken language as well. She has had difficulty using her voice ever since. She was a good student at the American school and there is little she cannot communicate in the sign language. But her old school began to shift exclusively to the Oral Method, and it is for this reason that her parents have moved her back to Canada.

  The house mother pushes and shoves and rearranges beds in the dorm and, for reasons of her own, assigns the tall girl to the now-empty bed beside Grania. When Grania walks into the room, Fry looks up and smiles. She has green eyes that stare into Grania’s, and straight-cut bangs. Her arms are covered with more freckles than Grania has ever seen on one person. A small round depression is visible in each cheek, whether she is smiling or not. There is a scent of lavender coming from the clothes she is wearing. She and Grania become instant friends.

  Fry is able to use the language of hands more rapidly than anyone Grania has ever seen, but she is self-conscious about her voice. “My voice is broken,” she tells Grania that first day when they sit on the edge of their beds and face each other. She makes the sign for break with her hands, and snaps the invisible voice that falls between them. “My voice is broken broken broken.”

  “Tell me,” Grania’s hands say. Since Fry has moved to the dorm, Grania’s own sign language has improved. “What was it like when you lost your hearing?”

  Fry replies in a beat as one hand bats the air over her shoulder. “Long time past. Five years now. I was sick—weeks in bed, not much remembering now. But I remember my heart pounding so hard I thought it would explode. First time I went outside, I felt my own footsteps walking through me. Like being trapped in a drum. I believed I was hearing. Maybe it was before the sickness. Maybe it was the last bit of hearing I had.” She looks away, then back. “What do you remember?”

  “Sounds. I think there are sounds in my head.”

  “Which sounds?” Fry leans forward.

  “Doors closing.” The edges of Grania’s palms slam together, facing out. “Big doors. By the office, at the entrance. First day here, I heard them shut behind me.” She stops.

  “You felt the doors,” says Fry. She makes a face. “The way we feel
thunder.”

  “No, I heard them.” Grania is insistent. “I heard the doors. Sometimes I dream about them banging.” She pauses. “I had a dream last night. Father brought me to his office to tell me I was going away—to a school where children’s ears do not hear. I was brought here, and then—my parents were outside the doors and I was in. I banged at the wood, and the house mother came.” She makes the O near her cheek, the name-sign for Miss O’Shaughnessy.

  Grania recalls, in the dream, looking up to a row of teeth, a wrinkling of skin, a face not unkind, wreathed by greying hair. She also remembers that in the dream, when Miss O’Shaughnessy’s mouth moved, she was babbling. She raised her index finger, the other three fingers joining the thumb. Her hand slid back from the side of her lips and made the tiniest bounce along the line of her jaw. The babbling continued, but Grania understood. It was her first formal word in the sign language—dormitory. The word that led her to the building where she slept her first night away from family and home.

  “It’s the sad place,” says Fry. “The big doors. Where we all cry when our parents leave us.”

  “I cried,” says Grania. “Every day for two weeks.” She hasn’t talked to anyone else about this. But now it is part of her history in the place. And she has a friend to tell.

  On the third Wednesday of June at the end of her first year, after nine long months of school, Grania lifts the soft-sided bag with the wooden handles that Father has brought with him so that she can carry her own small things on the steamer. Father has already arranged for her trunk to follow them to Deseronto. Grania sniffs carbolic when she thinks of the trunk; her own and everyone else’s will be fumigated, clothes and all, when they return in the fall.

  She isn’t going to think about the fall. She steps out through the big doors at the entrance. Today, a wedge of wood keeps each of the heavy panelled doors open so that people can come and go, in and out. Grania crosses the lawn two steps behind Father. When they reach the dusty road in front of the gates, she turns. The weather-vane on top of the roof, the steps, the buildings, all pull firmly together as if to say, “We’ll still be here in September.”

  She turns her back.

  From the road, the waves of the Bay of Quinte appear soft and grey. It is almost one o’clock in the afternoon. By four, every student will be gone, the little in care of the big, the big in care of teachers or supervisors who will deliver them to collecting points or appointed meeting places along the railway lines—west and east and north and south. Since early morning, horse and rig, express wagon and flat-roofed taxi-buses with open sides have been hauling away trunks and luggage and every trace of the students and the school year. After final assembly, even motor cars have arrived at the main entrance to collect the few children who are to be driven home in private vehicles.

  Grania and Fry hug each other and tears spill down Fry’s cheeks. Both girls know that when they return in September, Grania will be placed entirely with the Oral students, Fry with the Manual. No matter what, they vow, they will always be best friends.

  Miss Amos is wearing a cheerful strawberry red necktie on the final day of school, and a jacket over her long-sleeved blouse. She is busy coralling a group of children in her care, but she looks up as Grania leaves and she waves. Several of the older students, the seniors, are putting on their serious faces. The moment they walk or are driven through the gates, or step onto a railway platform, or wait on a wharf—the moment they leave the school grounds—they know they are entering a world fraught with the unannounced and the sudden. They have to blend in, they have to look normal. They are about to rejoin the hearing world.

  As Grania walks behind Father, the fingers of her free hand make T for Tress as she taps the letter against the side of her dress. She is travelling towards the sister she has not seen since the previous September. She wants to run, but Father walks steadily towards the dock and she catches up to him and keeps his pace. She glances at him sideways as the steamer approaches. His moustache needs a trim but she doesn’t care. She stays close to his side, and thinks of Grew the barber, and Main Street, and Father’s hotel, and the tower apartment, and Carlow, and her friends Orryn and Kenan, and the dugout. She thinks of her brothers, and Mother, and Mamo. She thinks of the journey ahead, the journey of just over two hours that will take the steamer to Northport for a brief stop and, finally, to the Deseronto wharf and home.

  After laughing and being hugged by Mamo and Mother and Bernard, and Patrick who has grown so much, and after touching everything she can see to make sure it is all as she left it—rocker, woodbin, mantel, clock—and after sniffing Mamo’s Canada Bouquet, and after shouting a vowel at Carlow, after all of this, she and Tress run upstairs and shut the door to their room. The beds are in the same place, the rag rug between. The framed daffodils, the oval mirror, the sampler about God’s eye and ear hang from their hooks on the wall. The maple outside the window is in full leaf.

  And now, the boundaries of their old private language explode as they begin to add in the new hand language that Grania has brought home. She teaches Tress with patience and expertise, positioning and repositioning her sister’s fingers, palms and thumbs.

  This is the sign for girl—she draws her thumb along her jawbone as if to tie a bonnet ribbon under her chin. This is the sign for play—she makes the Y sign and shakes out both hands. When the deaf boys’ team played hockey against the speaking boys in Belleville, her class was taken to a game. This is the sign for race, for running. She tells Tress about Victoria Day: how the children were taken for a picnic in a clearing in the woods by the bay. The senior girls gave a demonstration of fancy club swinging, and she was fascinated with the precision of the drill. She does not want to swing Indian clubs herself, but she might learn the scarf drill when she is older. Tress has never seen Indian club swinging or the scarf drill, and Grania stands on the rag rug and flings her arms about, trying to transfer the picture of tumbling clubs.

  What Grania remembers most about the Victoria Day celebrations is that she wanted nothing more than to enjoy herself and to run races with Fry. They came second in the three-legged and first in the boot race, and won an orange each and two candies. At the end of the afternoon, she and Fry helped with the smaller children, getting them back to the dorms, walking slowly up the low incline. Miss Amos tried to keep up the spirits of the little ones in the younger classes, and led them in the signed chant:

  The twenty-fourth of May,

  The Queen’s birthday,

  If we don’t get a holiday,

  We’ll all run away.

  That same evening, they ate prunes and bread and butter and milk for their supper, and later, after dark, they were taken outside again to watch a display of Roman candles, fire balloons and skyrockets, pin-wheels and fountain wheels. The night exploded silently before their eyes while, tired and excited, they leaned into each other’s warmth, their skirts tucked beneath them as they sat on the grass of the school lawns that were lighted all around with electric lights hidden inside Japanese lanterns. All of this, she tries to convey to Tress.

  It is years later, after Grania learns to own the sign language by taking it inside herself—though the hearing teachers will eventually forbid its use while she struggles to please them with her voice—it is years later when she realizes how close to the visual-gestural language she and Tress actually were with the childhood signs they once invented for themselves. Follow, one thumb tracking the other; want and eat and smile and water and fly.

  For her part, the first summer Grania comes home, Tress attempts to gather up and tell all of the remembered events that happened within house and hotel since Grania left. They communicate with excitement, Grania reading her sister’s lips as easily as she had before she left—the invisible air writing, too. Tress’s index finger writes C-o-r-a while she brings up the old complaints. Cora meddled in Aunt Maggie’s job at the library, and Aunt Maggie would not put up with it and gave Cora a piece of her mind. Grania tries to slow her sister
’s story, tries to put the meaning of things together. A piece of mind, she quickly realizes—and makes the adjustment to understanding—is an expression like kick the bucket, or apple of my eye.

  The sisters pause and sink back on their beds. They realize almost at the same instant that it is impossible—the catching up. Too much has happened. Three seasons have passed. They will have to live inside short moments of the present, like travellers who shed parts of their lives, like the travelling ladies upon whom they used to spy across the roof. Like wisps of cloud that vanish inside a summer wind.

  After Grania has been home for three days, Mamo sends her to get the Sunday book. Apart from the pictures and their captions, there are stories, too—hundreds of words in stories that Grania still does not know. When they put the book down, Grania begins to teach Mamo the hand alphabet—which the old arthritic hands delight in learning. M-a-m-o, Grania spells, and she creates a name-sign, tapping a three-fingered M against her cheek.

  Father has Grania’s roll of film developed, and Grania arranges her photos on the black pages of the new album that is waiting at home, a present from Bompa Jack. There are photos of Fry, and Fry and Grania together, and Nola, and Miss Amos, and Bridie and Erma and Celia and Grace. And there is one of the editor, Mr. Cedric, with the older boys in the print shop, all wearing their striped aprons, a kind boy named Charles holding up a copy of The Canadian Mute. There is a photo of the large rink in winter, and another of a group of boys standing beside a deep puddle outside the steps of Gibson Hospital, which Grania labels in her neat handwriting: Boys at school.

  When Father is not around, Mother prays for a miracle, and before Grania returns to school, she and Mother make the long trip east, first by train and then by steamer, down the St. Lawrence River, to the shrine of Ste. Anne de Beaupré in the province of Quebec. Grania stares up at huge wooden chandeliers and a towering crucifix, and sees men and women around her standing, sitting, standing. She feels Mother’s hands, one on each side of her head. Mother prays, and crosses herself, and Grania goes still and waits to see what will happen, but nothing changes inside her ears. She moves her lips in babbling prayers of her own when Mother tells her to pray to Ste. Anne, but she does not let Mother hear. Mother understands her voice and will know that she is making up the words. She watches to see what Mother will do next, and she follows as they walk between church and Cyclorama on their way back to the wharf. They are admitted inside and climb high steps to see the depiction of Jerusalem, and Grania, holding the railing, circles the platform and stays close to Mother in case large hands reach out of the giant panorama that surrounds them and pull something from her ears. Something that keeps her from hearing and that Mother wants removed. Mother crosses herself again and prays, and Grania keeps a close watch, and waits, and moves her lips in a babble. But nothing happens inside her ears.