Deafening

by Frances Itani

  Fry had struggled with written English all through school, and Grania had worked many long evenings beside her, trying to help, trying to pass on what Mamo had taught.

  She turned back to the paper and a change of news.

  I received a nice letter from my cousin. She was at a dance in California. She got the first prize for waltzing. She has learned the fox trot and all the new dances.

  I am tired of hearing about this war.

  And so am I, Grania thought, so am I. It made her body clench to think of it. It was a war Jim would soon be heading into. But she had not given up the hope that it would be over before he would have to leave.

  The last two items were written by Cedric.

  King George V has forbidden the use of liquor in his household, during the continuance of the war. His Majesty’s example has been followed by many prominent people in England, including Lord Kitchener and Premier Asquith.

  The children, naturally, have faith and trust in all that comes from home and when they have been taught in school to write ‘a pair of boots,’ and then read in a letter from home ‘a pare of butes,’ they are placed, as it were, on the horns of a dilemma.

  Grania wondered if the parents who sent the letter would be reading Cedric’s high-handed column.

  A shadow crossed the doorway; she saw the movement before Fry entered the room.

  Fry plunked down on the edge of her bed and stretched out her legs. “Four weeks,” her freckled hands signed. “Four more weeks, and Colin and I will be married.”

  “You look so far away,” Fry signed to Grania.

  They were sitting side by side on a mound in the orchard, up behind the farm buildings. Asparagus grew wild beneath the apple trees, which were in full blossom. Grania marvelled at the rows of trees and their geometric pattern; she could look around her from any spot and no matter in which direction—ahead, behind, diagonally—the lines of trees, like spokes from a hub, were exactly straight, whether the ground beneath them was uneven or flat. Every tree had the same distance between it and the next, on all sides, allowing for sunshine and growth.

  The ground was still warm from the day’s sun, the air heavy with fragrance. The aroma that enveloped the two friends varied with the shifting breeze—sometimes strong, sometimes faint. It was the strength of this aroma that told Grania when to look up at the leaves to detect the activity of the breeze. The slow, purposeful flights of the bees had diminished in the past few moments; the sun was about to set. Far off, three flattened clouds drifted over the bay. It was a place of such peace, Grania wished she could sit here forever. She inhaled the scent deeply and thought of Mamo and her Canada Bouquet, and she tried not to be homesick. Soon, she would be back with her family in Deseronto for the summer. Jim had promised to visit as often as he could. She missed him now, though it had been only three days since he’d last been at the school hospital with Dr. Whalen. Next weekend, they were to go on a picnic with Colin and Fry, in Jones Woods near the bay. Grania and Fry had already made plans for the food they would take.

  “I am far away,” Grania replied to her friend. “But I like coming to the orchard. I never get tired of it.” Her right hand was undulating. “You know, when I look at clouds drifting, I think song. Or maybe music. Problem is, I don’t know what goes with the words. Mamo told me she always sang one song that I liked when I was small. Before I was deaf.”

  “The hearing,” Fry said, “when they meet us, they always ask the same. Do you miss music? Do you miss the songs of the birds? As if nothing is worse.”

  “Music and birds are important to the hearing.”

  “When I’m in a bad mood I say, ‘How can I miss what I don’t know? So what if I can’t hear birds. I can see them.’”

  Grania had never tried to explain to Fry that she believed, or imagined she believed, that music and song were everywhere. Not only in clouds but in flights of birds, in oak leaves that brushed the dorm window, in the children’s legs as they raced across the lawns. “It’s silly, isn’t it,” she signed. “My memory of sound is gone for all those years—fourteen years—but I feel as if my brain remembers music.”

  “No, not silly.”

  “And I still have the same dreams I had when I first came here.” She shrugged. “The dreams don’t make sense. Everyone babbles with voice, and I understand. No one is deaf, no one is hearing. Songs I don’t know, sounds I can’t remember. Things are always mixed up.”

  Fry’s hands cracked the egg sign and mimed scramble, and she and Grania looked at each other and started to laugh.

  “Do you ever feel sorry for yourself?” Fry asked. Without waiting for a reply she continued. “I do. Sometimes I think hearing people have an easy life even though I know they have problems, too. But hearing people never had to learn to speak all over again. Your brain forgot sound; my brain forgot language. Even though my mother was right there to defend it. Every day, every day, she tried to make me remember. All the time, she corrected me. Pronounce. Think before you speak. I was her burden. That’s what she called me. My heavy burden.”

  Fry’s arms and shoulders sagged as she signed heavy. Grania had heard the stories before, and she patted her friend’s arm. They never got over the old memories.

  “Cora was our burden—the town’s, Deseronto’s.” Grania’s right hand shaped C-o-r-a, as she finger spelled the name. She had told Fry many stories about Nosy Parker Cora. “Your mother tried to make you remember; my mother hoped to make me hear.” Her fingers bobbed slightly, one hand raised as she made half the sign for hope. Then, both hands made the word pray. “Mother never gave up the guilt. I think she still believes that if she prays enough, someday I won’t be deaf.”

  She felt the hard wall that was Mother’s will, Mother’s intent. Three years after she finished school, here in the orchard, she could still feel Mother’s will.

  Grania remembered the jolt of the steamer as it bumped and shuddered its way to the edge of the St. Lawrence River and against Ste. Anne’s wharf. She remembered the procession of men and women—mostly women—as they paraded up the pier in long dresses and dark hats. Eighty pilgrims trekked past the lone tree, between two lanterns, beyond the first doorway with its massive sign: Magasin de CYCLORAMA. From the deck railing, Grania had watched the sign grow larger and larger from far off, before she and Mother disembarked. As they walked up the pier, her fingers spelled C-Y-C-L-O-R-A-M-A against her dress. She made the word on the side that was away from Mother, so her fingers would not be seen.

  Three flags—one was the American Stars and Stripes—hung sideways over the tall panels of the circular building. After they passed the store entrance, Grania lost sight of her mother and became squeezed between two stout women who had their heads down and whose lips were moving like mourners’. She thought she was going to smother but squirmed away and found her mother again. A thin man, his cheekbones and finger bones showing under his skin, was standing by the railing outside the store, a straw boater in his hand, and he led the crowd forward at a faster pace. Grania was amazed that such a rickety-looking man could move so quickly. He led them first to the big church, Ste. Anne’s, up the slope. After that, at the Cyclorama, Grania remembered how small she had felt next to the massive panels that encircled her.

  Later that summer, Mother wanted to take her to Montreal, to the little chapel on the mountain where there was a statue of Saint Joseph. Mother’s sister Annie had travelled from Rochester to Montreal one summer and had written to Mother about her pilgrimage. She had prayed to Saint Joseph and had walked up the dirt road to the chapel and she had been spoken to by Brother André himself. Mother was convinced that Brother André could heal Grania’s ears. But Father had said, “No.” Grania would not be going to Montreal. “No more miracles,” he told Mother. Grania had seen the white flush of anger on his face. “No more miracles for Grania.”

  Fry was waggling her fingers to get Grania’s attention, to bring her back.

  “Even now,” Fry signed, “I stumble over wor
ds. You’ve watched me. When I can’t find a word, I finger spell under the table like a little child. But some words still look the same to me. When I speak, I find out that the hearing say them differently. Wind and wind. Tear and tear. No wonder we get confused. How can I look at a word like c-u-p-b-o-a-r-d and know that its sound is supposed to be k-u-b b-e-r-d?” Fry spelled the words expertly, her fingers punctuating the air. “If you hadn’t helped me, I wouldn’t know any English at all.”

  “Yes, you would,” Grania said. But she knew the problems that Fry still had with grammar and the written word.

  In a parallel way, Grania had been encouraged to use voice—all the time, voice. In her senior classes, it was Miss Marks who’d helped her to shorten the time lag, to turn delayed understanding back into spoken response. She’d coaxed Grania and her classmates farther into language than they’d ever imagined they could go. It was Miss Marks, too, who had said, “When you lip read your partner, keep your back towards the light. The light should fall on the speaker’s face. Always keep your back towards the light.”

  Grania had tried to please this teacher she loved. During the years she’d been a student, there had been good teachers and teachers who were not so good. Some bullying took place, and always there was disciplined order to rule every activity. But Grania had struggled to put tongue and throat and breath around each word she uttered. And Miss Marks had listened, and pushed, and listened again.

  Now that Grania and Fry were workers at the school, each year at this time they watched the senior students worry about leaving their sheltered surroundings for good. Many had no choice but to return to their parents’ homes, something Grania and Fry had vowed they would never do. Grania reminded Fry of this now.

  “At least we haven’t ended up like old Mr. Wadsworth,” she said. “Do you remember how we worried so much?”

  Fry nodded. Mr. Wadsworth, a deaf man, lived alone in a one-room shack by a gravel road on a tiny patch of someone else’s farm—someone who felt sorry for him. He carried pieces of paper and a pencil with him everywhere, and had done so all his life. When he visited a neighbour, or attended a church supper, or a dance at someone’s farm, he sat patiently, waiting for someone to sit with him and write messages on his paper.

  Grania had often imagined him going home at night, sitting alone and looking over the scraps of paper, reviewing the day’s conversations:

  How are you?

  Good, good.

  Weather fine today?

  Oh yes.

  She looked at her friend, whom she dearly loved, and again she thought of the evenings and weekends she had tried to help with the written language. Fry still had no use for articles and prepositions—what Grania thought of as joining words. Fry had never understood why they were worth the bother.

  Grania thought of the Sunday book. Mamo saved me, she said to herself, but not to Fry. Mamo saved my life.

  She wondered if Jim understood how important Mamo was to her childhood and to her life now. Jim had lost his parents—they had died of typhoid—and he had been raised by loving grandparents. But they, too, had died. Grania had met only his Uncle Alex and his Aunt Jean. She wondered if Jim would consider her larger family his own after they married. And they would marry. Despite Mother writing to say, “No announcements.”

  It was possible, through all the years of believing she would somehow make Grania hear, that Mother had never given a thought to the idea that Grania might have a future of her own to consider.

  Chapter 7

  We are coming, Mother Britain,

  we are coming to your aid,

  There’s a debt we owe our fathers,

  and we mean to see it paid.

  From the jungles of Rhodesia,

  from the snows of Saskatoon,

  We are coming, Mother Britain,

  and we hope to see you soon.

  The Canadian

  Deseronto, Ontario

  Tress’s husband, Kenan, was gone. In two weeks, her own husband, Jim, would leave, along with hundreds of others from the area who had signed up.

  Husband. She was not used to shaping the sound. Chim, she said, and repeated his name. Chim. She moved about Aunt Maggie’s kitchen, a large bright room with a high ceiling patterned with swirls. She had known this place since childhood, but now it seemed shadowy and unfamiliar because she was in someone else’s home, trying to prepare a supper meal. Before her aunt had left, she’d opened doors to show Grania cupboard shelves and pantry shelves, and told her that she and Jim were to use whatever they wished. They had accepted the offer to stay in the tower apartment because Grania’s aunt and uncle had for some time wanted to travel across Lake Ontario to Oswego, to visit Aunt Maggie’s sister in the state of New York. Uncle Am had climbed up inside the tower, Jim behind him, on the ladder built into the back wall of the parlour, and showed Jim where to oil the gears of the tower clock. He showed him how to do the checks around the building, the offices below, the security, the jobs that were to be looked after while he was away. For now, the entire top floor, the only apartment in the building, was Jim and Grania’s private place.

  Grania was living with a man, sharing her sleep with a man. She was lying beside a man at night on the blue blanket spread out over the carpet in the parlour. She thought of the strangeness of this but, along with the strangeness, the love that was natural between them. In the morning they folded the blanket, the padding underneath, the bedding on top, and stashed it out of sight. They did not sleep in Aunt Maggie and Uncle Am’s bed. They wanted their own space. And it was not the first time Grania had spent the night sleeping on a rug.

  Jim had signed up with the Canadian Army Medical Corps and would go to a field ambulance depot where his training was to begin. He had been granted two weeks to settle his affairs. He was in the city now, for the day, and would be back on the early-evening train. They had been married the twenty-third of October in the church at Marysville, and a celebration had been held afterwards at Bompa Jack’s farm. Mamo had been there, Mother and Father, Tress and the boys, Great-Aunt Martha, aunts and uncles and great-uncles, Fry and Colin, and Jim’s Uncle Alex and Aunt Jean. Jim had promised his Uncle Alex that he would remain in Canada until the fall sawing was done, and the promise had been kept. Dr. Whalen sent a cheque, with his good wishes, and said that he was pleased that arrangements were being made for Jim to join a field ambulance unit. His own son, now a gunner, had left in July, as planned.

  Grania thought of the stillness around her during the wedding ceremony. Or perhaps she had shut out everyone except Jim. She’d had a sense of being cocooned the entire day; she barely remembered details until they reached Bompa’s farm. Then, the kitchen furniture was pushed to the end of the long room and there was dancing, and she was hugged, and kissed, and her hand was shaken, and gifts and wishes were pressed upon her. But throughout the afternoon and evening, she was aware of Jim no matter where he was standing—in the kitchen, in the parlour doorway, in the dining room where the buffet feast had been laid out over the rarely used Irish linen and the even less used oval table with a leaf inserted for extra length. Grania knew where he was at every moment. When they looked up and caught each other’s glance, they might have been side by side. He was just beginning to realize that he could speak to her silently across a full room; that his lips would be understood no matter how much noise, no matter how many people were between. He had begun to describe his actions, as if she couldn’t see for herself. He was laughing. In a few minutes, I’m going to borrow that mouth organ. I’m going to play, and do a jig to celebrate. His feet did a little hop. I’m going to work my way across the room and ask you to dance. He stopped laughing. My love, his lips said, in silence, My love.

  Grania reached over now to switch on the ceiling light. She had left her job at the school hospital in the middle of October, ten days before she was married. Now she was up over the post office, peeling potatoes in Deseronto. She remembered the buckets of potatoes she and Fry and the older girls
had peeled in the sink room at school when they’d helped out in the kitchen every Christmas Day. Fry was still at the school, still working in the big kitchen. Since their marriage, she and Colin had moved into their rented rooms. Now that the fall term was under way, they walked to work together early every morning.

  Grania pulled out the shelf of the flour cupboard and did not glance up again until she felt vibrations. Jim was in the doorway between kitchen and hall. He was rapping on the wall, trying not to frighten her by appearing suddenly at her side. If she hadn’t been so absorbed, she’d have seen him standing there. His hair was wet, his brown jacket soaked to his arms and chest, and—she saw now—his back was soaked as well.

  “Were you frightened? By the storm?”

  “Storm?” She read the word from his lips and glanced to her left, to the window that was set at a slant between ceiling and floor. She could see the slopes and angles of the tower roof. Her glance took in the window seat, Aunt Maggie’s ivy plant, the menacing sky beyond. It was dark out there, for the hour. She had switched on the light without noticing what was happening outside.

  “You didn’t know? You didn’t feel?”

  She crossed the hall to the street side of the apartment and looked down from the dining-room window. The storm that had terrorized the town for the past thirty minutes was over and she hadn’t so much as looked up. Branches had been knocked down and were blowing along Main Street. Leaves were flying through the air. There were wide puddles below; the mud was thick and deep, the road messy and grooved. Already, wheels had been trapped: three men were pushing at an auto. A tired-looking horse was being led away from a mired, abandoned buggy.

  Jim had taken off his muddy boots on the landing at the top of the stairs, but more mud was spattered up his trouser legs. He removed his jacket and came to stand beside her at the window and looked down and shook his head, and then he reached over and closed the dining-room curtains.