Deafening

by Frances Itani

  Now, Great-Aunt Martha was dead; she had died of a stroke in the spring, and Bompa Jack was alone again. Father went back to the Ninth Concession every two weeks to visit his father, taking supplies Bompa Jack might need from town, and staying overnight. Grania had gone with him at the end of August, and Father had surprised her during the supper meal at Bompa’s table. He talked more than he ever did at home, telling her about the days when he had been a boy growing up at the farm in that very house. “We did our chores, and once they were done we were allowed to play cards—except Sundays,” he said. He waved his hand over the table at which they were sitting. “The boys against the girls. Brother Am and I were great players in those days. We played forty-five, and in the fall when the geese were fat we twice won a goose, playing partners. Rummy 500—that was another game we liked. On Saturday nights there was sometimes a party in someone’s home; in winter we went with a team on the sleigh. There was always a violin, someone fiddling. Sometimes a man brought a banjo. If there were enough people, there was square dancing in the kitchen. One year the teacher boarded with us and she helped my mother make soap on Saturday mornings. But the summers were hard. We all put in time picking stone. Back-breaking work. And we cleared hardwood to burn, to make potash that was taken to Kingston to be sold.”

  Bompa Jack loved the old stories. It was all Grania could do to keep up with the two of them, when one added details to a reminiscence of the other. Late in the evening, Father went outside to fetch a bottle of whisky—though Grania had not seen him bring one to the farm—and that was when she had gone upstairs to bed.

  Grania’s hands selected and tucked and dipped into the box, the positioning of each item determined by its shape. She had fallen back into her old cocoon, no longer looking to Mamo and Tress to see what was going on. She thought of the latest package of tinned chicken and cake that she had sent to Jim. Last year in the fall, Bompa Jack had asked her to send apples from the farm. He would want her to send more again this year. The first time was an experiment; she’d wrapped eight, each one separate in a layer of newspaper, all sent with the hope that they would be edible on arrival. Jim had received them weeks later and reported that they hadn’t rotted at all. He’d been grateful to have them. This year, if she could keep the parcel a reasonable size, she would send more—a dozen, perhaps.

  But when she carried parcels to the post office, she still felt as if she were dropping them into an abyss that might or might not lead to over there. Each time she left the building, she felt as if she had given up something dear. The sending was an act of both belief and disbelief. Anything sent in the direction of the ocean might be swallowed by darkness and waves. Even after the trouble and care that went into the preparation, only a tiny part of her believed that what she had gathered and wrapped with her own hands would cross the wide ocean and be unpacked by the hands of the man she loved. As if to encourage this lack of faith, the sender was asked to write a second name on the outside—in the event that it could not be delivered to the first. She had begun to print Orryn’s name as the alternate address, in case Jim was on the move and the parcel did not catch up to him.

  Many times, Grania had imagined Jim reaching out, the tearing of paper, the careful folding of string—tucked into Jim’s pocket for future use—the lifting and examining of contents, one item at a time. Sometimes, months after she sent a parcel, a letter arrived thanking her for khaki handkerchiefs, for Oxo, for candy, for the navy blue scarf, for knee caps. But the acknowledgements were so long coming, they were by then unconnected to the earlier act of mailing.

  She thought of the Empress of Ireland, which had sunk in 1914, a few months before the war began. She’d been working at the school—it was the end of May, a Saturday morning. She had been invited to the sewing room to see the girls’ train dresses, the ones they designed and cut out and sewed for travel home in June. It had taken a full day for the news of the Empress to filter into the school and into the room where the students were finishing their fittings. Miss Marks walked past the doorway and saw Grania with the girls, and came in out of the hall to say—with lips and hands and serious face—that a ship had gone down in the St. Lawrence River, on its way to England. It had been rammed by the Norwegian collier Storstad—the teacher held the newspaper in one hand and finger spelled the name of the collier with the other. Many people had drowned. Grania remembered Miss Marks shaking out the P sign with her hand, to show the passengers going down and down and down.

  It was much later—in the fall when they were at school again and Grania was back at work in the hospital—when the second story of the Empress came in. Rosaleen, an Irish woman, a hearing woman on the domestic staff at the hospital, came running down the stone steps from outside, one of her thick heels missing from a shoe. She had lost it on her way across the grounds and the loss of it meant that she entered the bandage room at a running limp. She was waving an envelope, a letter she had mailed four months earlier to an aunt in England. The same letter—everyone present was allowed to look and wonder and touch—had come back that morning, stamped with the miraculous words: Recovered by divers from the Empress of Ireland.

  It was Cedric who uncovered the story for the school paper. The Canadian Pacific had hired divers to go down and blast a hole in the hull of the sunken ship. Not only had the divers retrieved silver ingots and cash and jewels from the ship’s safe, they had also brought up four boxcar loads of mail, and all of this had been dried and sorted and delivered back to the senders. Cedric was so taken by this, he published the details. “Rosaleen’s letter has been reposing on the bed of the mighty St. Lawrence River, ever since the sinking.” That was Cedric’s word, reposing. “The stamp was washed off, but the writing was perfectly distinct when the envelope was returned to sender.”

  How they had marvelled at that one letter surviving inside a mailbag deep under water. Under water with bodies. Grania had not forgotten that part of the story. More than a thousand people drowned when the ship went down. No one tried to blame that on the Germans. But when the Lusitania was torpedoed and took its place in the news, the Empress was forgotten because so many horrible events in Belgium had by then intervened. Now, both ships were in watery graves—one at sea, and one in the mud of the St. Lawrence.

  Grania thought of Grandfather O’Shaughnessy, the sheet twined round and round him before he was buried at sea. She thought of Mamo, living without him all these years. Grania had not considered adult loneliness when she was a child.

  She looked over at Mamo now. Instead, she saw Cora’s lips moving and Cora’s gaze directed at her. Cora was telling everyone about her daughter, Jewel, arriving this very day from Ottawa, by train. She would be waiting at home and they would have a visit—a good visit, Cora said, once her duties at the Red Cross were finished for the day. Jewel loved living in the capital. She had even been close to the Parliament Building when it was on fire last year, and she was able to report in some detail the tragedy of the event. One boy who witnessed the fire, Cora said, had never been right in the head since.

  Grania pretended not to understand what Cora was saying. She looked down at her hands and methodically packed the box. Sometimes the easiest way to deal with Cora was to pretend. At least Jim’s name had not been shaped on Cora’s lips. Some days, she came right up to Grania and said, “Have you had a letter from Jim today?” If Grania had not, it was difficult not to feel badly. Mail was the event of the day for most people in town—mail and papers. But not for Cora, who had no family member overseas.

  Grania remembered the first wet winter of the war when Orryn was training in England and sent a letter to Kenan from Salisbury Plain. We’ve had another fierce storm here, and the mail tent blew down. Most of the letters were sucked up into the sky and have never been seen again.

  She imagined thousands of envelopes drawn up into a funnel of darkness hovering over the land. Not like Rosaleen’s letter, which had gone straight down. Rosaleen’s had reposed on the bed of the St. Lawrence and had rise
n again to be returned to sender.

  Cora was beaming now; she was on to another topic—Vernon Castle. She had been honoured to meet him, she said. She had shaken hands with him and his wife, Irene, and they had promised to dance at a benefit in Deseronto. Now that he was teaching flying here at Camp Mohawk, the town would be seeing more of the famous dancing couple.

  “Moving picture stars,” said Cora’s lips. “Imagine. In our little town. And he has an expensive automobile.”

  Tress and Grania exchanged glances, but Mamo did not look up. Vernon Castle had visited the hotel. He had stopped in at the dining room for a meal because he’d been told about Mother’s cooking. He wore his uniform and silver wings; he had a delicate fine-featured face, with a broad forehead and seagull hairline. He’d chatted with the whole family. Father came out of his office to meet him. Patrick wanted to know about his pet monkey, and was told that it was back at the camp. Tress and Grania shook his hand. The Flight Commander told the family that his squadron would have to move to Texas in November, because of the winter flying conditions around Deseronto. Patrick, still in high school, had been thrilled to meet the famous flyer; Castle was his hero. Grania knew that her younger brother was itching to go off to war himself, despite being under age. On the weekends, he often ran out of the house and stood on the street or in the yard at the back, and looked up to the sky. When Grania asked, he told her he’d heard the buzz of an aeroplane. He had already visited both training camps, Rathbun and Mohawk, to have a look around, and he had talked to the men who were learning to be flyers. One of them permitted him to sit in the front pit of his machine while it was parked in a row between other aeroplanes.

  Grania glanced Cora’s way again.

  “We were talking about fears,” Cora’s lips said. The sentence seemed to be directed at Grania.

  Grania stopped daydreaming. She’d been left behind in the last conversation. But this time she couldn’t ignore Cora because the woman was right beside her, peering into the box Grania had just finished packing.

  “I was saying how fearful it must be to know that someone could approach you from behind in the dark and you wouldn’t even know.” She was facing Grania, her lips articulating firmly. Without giving her a chance to answer, she snapped up the instruction page from Dominion Headquarters that Tress had taken down, and moved away to tack it up again, by the door.

  “No,” Grania said, and saw at once that her voice had Cora’s attention. Cora’s back had tightened.

  The raised voice of the deaf, this is what it sounds like when we don’t keep it close.

  The knitters looked up from their stitches, hands unfaltering in their rhythm. Mamo and Tress were staring.

  “No,” said Grania again. She made her voice bigger. This was not the sweet little voice that Cora described. “I never, ever, think about what is behind.”

  Cora’s back relaxed but she did not turn around.

  Behind doesn’t exist, Grania muttered to herself. The dark, now that is another matter. Not one that I would discuss with you.

  On the way home, Grania put the old question to Mamo again. “Why is Cora like this? Why does she seem to be angry? Why is she always angry with me?” Her fingers were tapping the side of her skirt. Her very existence seemed to offend Cora.

  But Mamo could only shake her head. “It’s a long road without a turn,” her lips said. She had a firm grip of Grania’s arm and they took their time stepping up to the boardwalk and walking back to the house. Tress had left them and had hurried ahead to Meagher’s store to see the newly arrived bolts of winter cloth that had been advertised in the paper.

  Mamo caught Grania’s attention and stopped to speak. “Cora has a narrow way of looking at the world,” she said. “But if someone’s heart is small, you can be sure that the person always lives with the knowledge of it.”

  While the women had been indoors, packing boxes for the Red Cross, Bernard, out walking, had been pinned with a white feather by Jewel, Cora’s visiting daughter.

  Grania wanted to march right out to speak to Jewel.

  “She doesn’t know anything about my lung, Grainy. There is no point explaining to her or anyone else.”

  But Bernard had been humiliated. Grania saw it in his face as he left the house to go through the passageway. She thought about him through supper and again when she went upstairs later and paced around her room. She looked at Jim’s photograph—he was squinting as he leaned back against the split-rail fence at the end of the path in the woods. She remembered how he had pulled the leaves from the strands of her hair. She ran her fingers over the surface of the photo, and then she stared out at the darkness of the bay. She closed the curtains, and sipped at the cup of tea she had carried up from the kitchen. She could not settle down. When Tress came upstairs, Grania left the room to go down.

  She paused on the landing and looked through the porthole at the back of the house. She sometimes thought of the scene outside the glass circle as her own dark ocean—her ocean of land. She pressed her forehead to the thickness of glass. Another season was drifting by. Her husband had been gone for two years. She was at loose ends. Mamo had taught her long ago about loose ends. “Fidgety,” Mamo had explained. “When you don’t know what to do with yourself. That’s what it means to be at loose ends.”

  Grania wanted to talk to Bernard.

  She would wait until things were quiet. She would persuade him to stop what he was doing—cleaning up, or polishing glasses in the beverage room. He’d be working at something. His breathing was fine as long as he stayed away from stairs inside, or hills outside. As long as he moved at a measured pace.

  Grania wanted to coax him to the lobby to sit beside her. They would behave as if they were guests—the way she and Grew sometimes sat across from each other during the late afternoons, reading war news in the papers. She and Bernard would sink into two of the grand leather chairs. They would converse non-stop. She would use voice, and he would pay close attention; he would speak softly and she would read his lips. He knew the single-hand alphabet, even if he had never learned as much of the sign language as Tress knew.

  But Bernard kept his thoughts to himself. Still, Grania wanted him to be angry about Jewel pinning him on the street. She wanted him to know how valuable he was to her. She wanted to tell him, too, that she had seen him early in the week, on the stoop behind the house on Thomas Street where Kay lived with her Granny. He’d been fitting storm windows at the back, helping to prepare the house for winter. She wanted to say, Invite Kay for tea, Bernard. She’s lonely, too. She has been alone for a long time. I’ll invite her, if you like.

  Grania knew that it was becoming more and more difficult for Kay to leave Granny alone. Some people in town called her Runaway Granny now. Granny had made her way up to Aunt Maggie’s unlocked apartment one day, and climbed the ladder to the clock tower. Another morning, she had been found in her nightgown on Mrs. McClelland’s stoop. Kay was looking for a woman to help with her son, during the hours she worked at the glass factory. It was becoming impossible to leave Granny and the child alone.

  Grania wanted to talk to Bernard about all of this. And after Bernard would speak, she would tell him—What would she tell him? That on Friday the twenty-first of September, 1917, she was filled with a desperate longing. A loneliness so brittle, she believed that she would break in two.

  It was nine in the evening when she went through the passageway and over to the hotel. Bernard, as if he had known she was coming, was walking towards her across the lobby. He held an envelope in his left hand and before she could touch it, he rotated his closed right hand over his heart. Sign language. His lips were saying, “Sorry, Grainy, sorry,” before he reached her. She saw Jim’s letter coming towards her. It was the feather, the damnable white feather that had upset Bernard. Otherwise, he’d never have forgotten. He had stuffed the letter into his jacket pocket and there it had stayed. He’d meant to give it to her when she got home from the Red Cross. He was writing S-o-r-r-y i
n the air, in careful, even script. She stopped him. She was full of smiles.

  “When I was out in the afternoon,” he said, “Jack Conlin asked me to give it to you. He was making a special trip from the post office because he wanted you to have it right away. A second mailbag came in. He met me on the street, and then Cora’s daughter…” Bernard looked past Grania’s shoulder but not before he placed the envelope in her extended hand.

  Grania hugged him and looked around the room. She and Bernard had the place to themselves. She headed for a large armchair in the corner and sank into it.

  The envelope was wrinkled, but untorn. The handwriting was small but recognizably Jim’s. The envelope had an English stamp and an English postmark, and there was a thickening beneath the paper. Grania held her breath. She looked up to see Bernard, watching.

  “Go ahead,” his lips said. “Open.”

  She slit the envelope carefully. Every envelope, every letter, was stored in the biscuit tin in the house, upstairs.

  She pulled out a picture postcard in sepia tones. Printed in the lower front corner in white lettering were the words, The Leas Bandstand, Folkestone.

  Jim was on leave.

  The picture showed a circular bandstand on the left, a wide terrace in the middle. Below that, were a grassy slope and a narrow boardwalk above the sea. A row of lampposts stretched off into the distance. Some people in the picture wore capes over their shoulders; others were being pushed in wicker wheelchairs. Men in more wheelchairs were lined up near the terrace. Taking the air. A scene, perhaps, of a Sunday afternoon. On the grounds were folding chairs made of wood and canvas, each with a high back and its own small awning. In the open-air bandstand, uniformed bandsmen were either playing their instruments or preparing to play.

  Grania turned the card to see three words, handwritten: On the Terrace. Inside the envelope, Jim had tucked a thin sheet of paper. His once generous handwriting was tightly scrunched.