Deafening

by Frances Itani

  They were in the new residence now; they had moved a year ago, just before the June visit of the Duke and Duchess of Connaught, their daughter the Princess Patricia, and their entourage. The royal party had arrived in a grand automobile that glided onto the school grounds while the younger children, lining the edges of the walk, waved their small Union Jacks. Grania had taken a photo with her box camera that sunny day but it had come out disappointingly blurred, the faces no more than featureless smudges. All that could be seen were the large-brimmed hats and long dresses of the Duchess and the Princess Patricia, and their closed parasols pointing to the boards of the outdoor platform. The Duke and two other men wore top hats. The bunting, strung between trees behind the platform, had drooped. In the photo, the scene appeared rather sad. But it hadn’t been sad at all. There had been huge excitement that day. That was before the start of the war. Now, one of the visiting party in the photograph was dead: Colonel Farquhar, Commanding Officer of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, had already been killed in action at the Front.

  The official opening of the girls’ new residence had actually happened after the royal visit, in October, the day before the children’s Hallowe’en party. Premier Hearst had visited to do the honours that day, but the girls had moved in long before that.

  Grania now held up a palm to Fry. Sunday, she signed. Church. Don’t go back to sleep. Fry was off duty but in charge of getting the younger girls to breakfast. After that, she was responsible for taking the older Catholic children to St. Michael’s before seven. Like Grania, Fry was one of a few students who had stayed on at the institution to work after graduation. Fry worked in the big kitchen from which meals were served, nine months of the year, to more than three hundred children and staff. Towards the end of June, Fry and Colin would be married. Tall blond Colin had been in the Manual class with Fry when they were students, and now worked as Mr. Cedric’s assistant in the print shop.

  The rest of Fry and Colin’s class had long since dispersed, as had Grania’s schoolmates from the Oral class. Many had returned to their parents’ homes to live. Some young men had left for type-setting jobs in other cities. One boy, a good friend to Colin, worked in Pittsburgh and wrote to Colin frequently. In July, Colin and Fry would be moving to the upstairs of a house within walking distance of the school, where they had found three rooms to rent. In September, Fry would return to work in the kitchen, and Colin to the print shop.

  Grania thought about Jim. He had been part of her life for more than eight months now, and he had managed this by appearing from a far-off place she knew nothing about—Prince Edward Island, by the sea. After her first meeting with him at the school hospital last fall, he’d persisted in returning to speak to her; he’d come back on the pretext of doing an errand for Dr. Whalen, even when there was no errand to invent. In the winter, with her parents’ permission, he had taken her to meet his Uncle Alex and Aunt Jean at their farm in the country, not far from Read. At Easter, he’d travelled by train with Grania to Deseronto for the day to meet her family. Tress and Kenan, who’d married the year before and now lived in rented rooms in a house on Dundas Street, had come to the hotel to join the rest of the family for dinner. Everyone had greeted Jim with enthusiasm except Grania’s parents, who had been courteous but cautious. “Bring him home,” Mother had written to Grania in advance of the visit. “But make no announcements.”

  Were her parents worried about him going off to war, worried that Grania would be left alone? Kenan would be leaving soon, and Tress would be alone. Or were they concerned because Jim was a hearing man? In any case, there was no announcement to make. Not yet. But Grania knew it would come.

  At home, Patrick had questioned Jim relentlessly when he discovered that he would be joining up in the fall. Patrick wanted to talk about nothing but the war. Bernard had greeted Jim warmly and quietly. Mamo declared to everyone, when Jim was not in the room, that it was plain to see that he cared very much for their Grania.

  To Grania, Jim was a persistent and earnest young man who was full of hope. Being with him gave her hope—if anyone could dare to hope during a war. Jim often hummed, his lips moving in some private song of his own. She said his name aloud, and smiled to herself. He had told her that when she spoke his name, it came out sounding like Chim.

  Grania did not know how events would unfold, any more than anyone did, heading into the summer months of 1915. She felt the tension underlying all talk of war; she saw the anxiety of families when a loved one in uniform said goodbye. She tried not to think about Jim joining up in the fall. Newspapers were predicting, as they had the previous autumn, that this time the war really would be over by Christmas. But a steady flow of young men continued to leave the country. More and more had signed up since the sinking of the Lusitania. And Grania knew, and Jim knew, that within months he would be leaving for over there.

  The previous fall, moments after Miss MacKay had introduced Grania to Jim in the bandage room, Miss Marks, Grania’s former teacher from her senior years, and now her friend, had come down the steps from outside, leading a long line of students who were arriving to have their measurements taken. Every fall, heights and weights were recorded and hair checked for nits. One by one, the numbers were entered in the student pages of the ledger called Medical Records, along with head, arm and leg measurements. These would be repeated in June, for comparison, at the end of the school year.

  Miss Marks had left the pupils with Miss MacKay below, and followed Grania up the stairs. She fluttered her hand to get Grania’s attention.

  “You’ve forgotten,” her lips said. She was smiling. “There’s a trick.” She swiped her hand across her own forehead, forget. Miss Marks had learned the sign language and always signed and spoke at the same time.

  Grania frowned. Trick?

  “When you meet someone. I saw the young man downstairs. There are always tricks.”

  Grania’s eyes, intent, watched the familiar lips.

  “Tricks the deaf children have been teaching me ever since I first came here. I may be able to hear, but I’m always learning, too.”

  “You’re the teacher who sees as much as we see.”

  “Never so fast.”

  “What trick?”

  “If you’re worried about not being understood, get the person to talk. You take charge. We used to go over this in class. Ask questions while you’re watching lips, tongue, mannerisms—all the cues you need to give yourself time. You can lip read every person in this place, Grania. But the hearing world is out there beyond the gates.”

  “I go back to it every summer.”

  “Back to your family. Protection.”

  “True.” Grania’s index finger arced forward off her chin, true. “You want me to ingade in conversation.”

  They both laughed at their private joke. For years, Grania had understood one of the instructions in Articulation class to be ingade in conversation. Miss Marks had caught and corrected that, but only by chance, and long after Grania had finished school.

  “Next time a young man arrives at the door…”

  But Grania was already arguing with herself.

  I could have stayed downstairs. I could have “engaged” in conversation. I could have said more. I know the words. I could have joined in. But she had not. Jim Lloyd was a hearing man and she had run away. She had escaped to safety up the stairs.

  At this moment, she was wishing that she had wakened earlier. She hurried around the corner of the main building, alert to aromas wafting from the kitchen. Cook would be preparing pancakes for hungry children who were being roused—older helping younger—and making their way through the halls to stand before rows of sinks. As milking had to be done before breakfast, the farm boys were already up and out at the barns. On the dining tables there would be maple syrup in plenty this morning. Sugar snow had come and gone, farmers’ trees were tapped, the new syrup was in, the old no longer rationed. The children loved their syrup, and their Saturday-night candies, too
, if they had a copper to spend when the basket was passed around.

  Grania felt unevenness beneath her shoes as she almost stumbled over a clump of earth. New shoots had shoved up through last year’s old grass and the surface was damp with dew. Every year, the older boys pushed the heavy roller over the lawns to flatten the lumps. She looked back to see if her feet had left an imprint. She had been counting under her breath—316 steps from dorm to hospital door, part of her internal knowledge of the place. As she approached, she saw movement and looked up. Miss MacKay was on the upper veranda, shaking a blanket over the railing. She waved, and made the sign for La Grippe. Like most of the staff she was a hearing person, but she knew more of the sign language than most. She held her nose and, with one hand, flung out her fingers: La Grippe, almost gone.

  Grania signed back, We hope. She laughed, a muffled sound coming from her throat. La Grippe had raced through the dorms, tiring everyone out. Only a month before, the children had been quarantined for another reason: there had been so many measles cases in Belleville, no one was permitted walks or excursions into the city.

  Grania glanced to the right as she rounded the building and paused when she saw soldiers marching on the road past the school. Reminders of war were everywhere; she was surrounded. Soldiers were frequently seen near the Armouries, and at the Belleville station where they said their farewells and joined eastbound trainloads of other soldiers passing through. Uniformed men in brown were also seen on Zwick Island, where they sometimes did their drill, and on Front Street and along Cannifton Road.

  When word of the Lusitania had first arrived at the school, Cedric had stopped everything to pen his editorial, and Colin and the boys in the print shop had had to work extra hours to reset type. Grania had been frightened by the news. She remembered a small boy who had drowned in the Bay of Quinte one summer when she’d been home for the holidays, and she recalled the sorrow on the faces of his parents. After the funeral, Mamo had shaken her head grimly and said that the boy’s family had been known to grow marigolds, the flower of death, in their garden. Now, it was impossible for Grania to expand the image of one dead boy to encompass the picture of 150 dead babies floating in the sea off the coast of Ireland.

  The beautiful land called Ireland. It wasn’t so easy to conjure that, either. The picture she had always had in her head was the one her grandmother had given her through story. With the sinking of the Lusitania, Mamo’s word picture was being replaced by another, one that held murky waters and dark sea and drowning babies washing up through waves. It was this picture that lurked in her mind, the one that erupted no matter where Grania was during the day.

  As she ran down the steps and into the bandage room, she checked the clock. She was not late. She was wearing her knitted sweater coat, a gift from Mamo that kept out the chill at this time of year, and she braced herself before she pulled it off. Sometimes, in the early morning, every building on the hundred-acre grounds was bleak with cold. But the sun was up. A warm day was promised.

  Grania had been invited to work at Gibson Hospital the year she graduated, because she had the aptitude—or so the charge nurse had told her. “The aptitude for putting those animated hands of yours into the fray.” She did not have a delicate stomach. She could clean up after a child who had thrown up without throwing up herself. She could change a dressing and compress a stye. She could smooth a counterpane with forty-five-degree corners. She could make a bed, with and without a child between the sheets, and had done both hundreds of times. She worked six days a week and occasionally had two days off together. The infirmary never closed while school was in session—except on “Miracle” Christmas Day the previous year, when not a single child had suffered from indigestion or an infected throat.

  Today, once the sick children were washed and bathed, it would be her job to prepare the ledger for tomorrow morning before Dr. Whalen visited. Mrs. Sutton, the charge nurse, would be back Monday as well. The charge nurse never worked weekends except in times of epidemic, and there hadn’t been one of those since early winter, when the thirty beds had been filled with children spotted with chicken pox. The sign had been common enough in the school halls—two fingers plucking at the cheek—as students searched one another’s faces for telltale spots.

  Grania thought of Fry and hoped her friend had managed to stay awake; Fry was notorious for sleeping in. After she and Colin married, it would be Colin’s responsibility to push her out of bed in the morning. If he stayed. He had invented every trick he could think of to try to join up, even knowing that the army didn’t need deaf boys. And Fry didn’t want him to go. They had talked about moving to Toronto, where their families lived; Colin was certain he could get a job in a print shop there. But if Fry left her job in the school kitchen, the only hope she would have for work would be as a domestic. Ads from Toronto were frequently placed in the school paper: Good deaf girl, wanted for domestic work. If Fry were to leave, Grania would be without her best friend.

  In the late afternoon, after work, Grania had an hour to fill before she was to meet Fry. They planned to walk up through the orchard after supper, before the evening chill settled over the grounds. She stopped off at the main building to pick up a copy of the school paper to take back with her to the residence, and she leafed through it as she walked.

  The school paper, printed twice monthly since 1892, had started out as The Canadian Mute but changed its name during the 1913 school year, after the official name of the school changed. The school dropped the word Dumb; the paper dropped the word Mute. When pupils were enrolled at the school, their parents were sent a copy in hopes that they would subscribe, fifty cents a year. The paper did more than report school news; it shared information with schools for the deaf in many parts of North America and, in some ways, was a wide-reaching community paper. Students continued to subscribe after they left school, and some sent news back. Mr. Cedric had been editor-in-chief and teacher in the print shop for the past fourteen years.

  Grania always read Cedric’s editorials, as well as articles and stories and “Items of Interest,” but her favourite page was the “Locals” because it was here that the children spoke for themselves. Cedric made corrections, repaired grammar and put the children’s words into what he called the King’s English. Much of the time, he flattened the voices until they merged to become one. But some voices refused to be flattened, and this was what Grania looked for—voices that were too distinct to be made to disappear.

  This week, as always, the students were drawn to disaster. Because the Lusitania had been torpedoed after the submission deadline, most of the writings were about other forms of disaster. Grania lay back on her bed, propped by pillows, and read what the children had to say.

  I received a welcome letter from my mother. My cousin has gone to War. My uncle fell and broke his arm and split his nose in pieces. Another cousin ran a nail through his thumb and blood poisoning set in. They live in England.

  My brother wrote that when he was in the trench many bullets went over his head and he heard a noise like bees buzzing.

  Yesterday some boys told me that some German soldiers took a Canadian soldier and they hammered the nails into the Canadian’s hands. He was very much hurt. They were brutes.

  I heard that my Uncle died at the first of the month. He left a widow and seven children. Uncle was sick with heart trouble. He is better off out of this wicked wicked world.

  I have an uncle who is doing garrison duty in Bermuda. When he left, he looked such a brave soldier, I could hardly keep my tears inside my little eyes.

  Grania smiled at this, written by young Paddy, who was twelve and whose heart melted at every occasion. Another boy, Charles, wrote:

  Mr. Sails went to the barn and caught 35 chickens. He chopped off their heads and carried them to the kitchen where the feathers were plucked. The cook put them in the boiler.

  Chicken and dumpling day, a Sunday two weeks before. Grania and Fry, who’d been off that day, helped the children, who sa
t at side-by-side tables. Every child had a plate, knife and fork. Every table had a cloth, five children to a side, enamel serving bowls at both ends. Colin, on the other side of the room, went up and down the rows tucking napkins into the collars of the little boys. Colin would be a good father if he and Fry ever had children. Which, Grania thought, would not make Mr. Bell happy—if he were here to know. Colin, unlike Fry, had been born deaf to deaf parents. Mr. Bell had worried himself over marriages between deaf people, even though he had worked with deaf children in Boston when he was a young man, and had married a deaf woman himself. Now he lived close to the sea in Nova Scotia, not far from the province in which Jim had grown up. Grania turned a page of The Canadian and read the notice about Mr. Bell’s new book, available from New York. “Professor Alexander Graham Bell has made a profound study of the human voice and, in this work, has actually taken apart the human larynx and all its accessories as if it were merely a telephone. His disclosures are fascinatingly interesting and highly instructive.”

  Maybe our own students here at school will have a better chance for learning, Grania thought. Better than we had. The schooling had recently been extended to ten years, rather than the seven she had put in before her own graduation. Maybe, she thought, the students will have a real chance, now, to improve reading, writing, spelling, the big problems that are often never overcome.