Deafening

by Frances Itani

  Mamo has helped her and Tress to pack. “Two dresses that won’t crease too much. Enough underwear for three days. And keep your hat on at all times except when you’re in bed.” She has arranged for them to stay in Toronto with Mother’s brother Uncle James and his wife, Aunt Minna, and it is she who has bought the tickets. Grania now knows that the secret hours Mamo stayed in her room were spent sewing a suit for Dr. Clark’s wife, Mildred. Her arthritic hands remembered the old skills and created a splendid tailored suit of fine English broadcloth with a calf-length skirt, and a long jacket with sleeves that narrowed at the wrists. The money she received has funded the trip to Toronto. It is Mamo who has noticed the coolness between the sisters and who has insisted that it is time for the two of them to get away.

  “The mail will be here when you return,” she told Grania. It is Mamo, too, who dreamed up the idea that she herself would move into the little house with Kenan while Tress has three days away on her own. A change. Neither of the sisters has considered taking a trip or thought about “a change,” but now they find themselves side by side, leaning into the velour of the seats, each seat with its rectangle of laundered cloth fastened over the headrest. Excitedly, they shift and settle and focus silently and self-consciously, and they stare out the window.

  Grania stares at the freight train that slides past and makes it seem as if she herself is moving, though their own train hasn’t left the station. She glimpses the backs and noses of cattle between slats of the moving freight cars, chunks of straw sticking out beneath the boards, dirty water—or is it cow pee?—dripping onto the tracks. And then her own coach gives a tug and pulls away from the platform. The train gathers momentum as it crosses the narrow Moira River, passes the houses, the fields, the ponds. Ducks fly up in startled pairs from marshy areas near the tracks, and the city is left behind.

  They face forward, and because of the newness of the journey it is ten or fifteen minutes before they begin a soft conversation of lips—not hands; they don’t want busybodies staring. Tress does not have to speak aloud—what reason would there be to do so?—but shapes words with her lips, and Grania watches and replies in low tones, keeping a close eye on Tress’s expression so she’ll be sure to see the signal if her own voice begins to rise.

  The peach-basket lady is on board, riding backwards in an end seat that faces them, and, while the train sways side to side, constantly correcting its own balance, the peach-basket lady looks out the window and back to the aisle and keeps up a whispered conversation with herself. She is wearing a long dress, and wisps of hair stick straight out from under a navy straw hat. Everyone on the train seems to know her. Grania and Tress have seen her during the past few years, riding the trains between Belleville and Deseronto and Napanee. She simply appeared one day, and since then she has been sighted as far as Queensboro, travelling to the pyrite mine and back. She may or may not have a ticket or a pass, buried under the heap of clothing at the bottom of her basket; if she does, the conductors never ask to see it. There is a wide rack above her, stretching the length of the coach, but she does not place the basket up there, preferring to keep it beside her or on her lap. There are never peaches inside, only her clothes and always a quart sealer of maple syrup poking up. If this is consumed and replenished from time to time, no one knows for sure. Her husband, it is said, was once a brakeman with the Bay of Quinte Railway and was killed by a moving engine moments after checking the switching on his section of track. And then, years after the accident, with her few belongings in the basket with the half-hoop wooden handle, the peach-basket lady began to ride the trains. She whispers silently and continuously to herself, and Grania lip reads the words from her own seat. When Grania smiles, Tress’s lips shape the silent question, “What did she say?” and Grania replies, in a low breath, “She says her fat is jiggling because it’s a jerky ride today.” Tress smiles and settles back. If they were children, they might have made the crazy sign beside their ears, but now they just wonder about how she gets her food and if she washes in the train lavatory or at the stations, or if people give her money, or if she has relatives in some town along the way. No one knows anything about her except that she has no children and that she is always riding the trains.

  In Toronto, Grania plans to buy presents for Christmas with the money she has been saving from Jim’s assigned pay. She receives fifty dollars a month now; when Jim first left, her allowance was forty-five. She has made a list of what she wants to buy: a Windsor tie for Father, almond-scented hand lotion for Mother and, as a surprise for Patrick when he comes home—in hopes that he will go back to school—a dictionary with 763 words. She saw it advertised for nineteen cents in the Toronto paper. She has already sent an early Christmas parcel of chocolate and pound cake to Patrick, and eight separately wrapped apples from Bompa Jack’s farm. Patrick is still training in England, and Grania prays that he will stay there until the war is over. People are saying it really will be over soon, after the August push began a new momentum against the German lines. But this has all been said before.

  For Mamo, she will buy an extra bottle of Canada Bouquet. For Bernard, a Tipperary collar. She is not certain, but Bernard disappears several times a week when he is off work, and he has been seen going into Runaway Granny’s house. One day, he was there to oversee the delivery of coal. He says nothing about this to anyone, and Grania is hopeful that he and Kay will find a place for each other in their lonely lives. She has not breathed a word of this to Tress because Tress is preoccupied with her own troubles. Besides, Grania knows that Bernard likes to be private. If anyone speaks to him about Kay now, he might run in the opposite direction. She mentioned this to Mamo, and was not surprised to know that Mamo has noticed and is keeping quiet, too. Grania looks over at Tress and wonders if there are things that they won’t be able to talk about now. But Tress’s eyes are closed; she is resting.

  The Exhibition is on in Toronto, and Grania and Tress plan to attend during their visit. Last year a Toronto cousin wrote to tell them that the grandstand show included a mock night attack on the dugouts of the Hun. Grania does not want to see such a spectacle this year, not while Jim is over there, not while the headlines are shouting about the big push. Nor does she want to see blood-stained trousers that reveal the exact place a man’s leg was torn off. She has imagination enough to fill the picture gaps, and does not need artifacts to point the way. Instead, she will go to see the livestock, and the food exhibits, and the midway, and she will take in the outdoor sights at the fair.

  Their first venture out, the day after arrival, they treat themselves to a ride on the streetcar and a trip to Mr. Eaton’s store. For three hours they browse through women’s clothing, coats and collars, serge skirts and kid gloves. They go up to the Grill Room on the fifth floor and indulge in the 25 cent Afternoon Special, and they order what they would never find in the hotel dining room at home: lobster salad with mayonnaise dressing; fancy pastry with whipped cream to go with a shared pot of tea. “Aren’t we grand?” Grania says. Her words can scarcely be heard, but Tress knows exactly what she says and shapes her own words back. Again, they avoid the use of the sign language in public, though they use it animatedly enough in front of their cousins and Aunt Minna and Uncle James. If Grania misses a reference to someone’s name, or if everyone is talking at once, Tress scrolls out the words for her into the air. Tress is relaxed here; Grania has noticed that she smiles more and joins the shared laughter with the cousins. She is more like the old Tress, but Grania still detects the anger.

  On their last afternoon in the city, they hurry through crowded streets and find the moving picture theatre where Lillian and Dorothy Gish and the handsome, moustached Robert Harron are starring in Hearts of the World. They arrive just before the moving picture begins; the screen is the largest Grania has ever seen. The lights dim and she sits, rigid and straight, and focuses her attention so she won’t miss a single thing. Tress sits close beside her. Grania frowns when she sees how rapidly the scenes change. Sh
e squints, trying to follow the multitude of detail, trying to get into the rhythm of the changing pictures. She strains to read the actors’ lips on the silent screen, and sees two French words, libre and merci—words she knows because when the war began these travelled from lip to lip at the Belleville school. Tress nudges, not knowing the French words, not being able to lip read the way Grania can, and Grania whispers their meaning into her sister’s ear.

  But there is action in this picture; so much happens, Grania can hardly bear to watch. Earth erupts like a volcano spewing high. Young men in trenches grimace at one another; men go over the top and fall down. More men are running running towards the enemy, and jumping down into trenches and stabbing with bayonets. There are flame throwers and explosives with long handles and mud, and more mud, and water, and marching men, fighting men, battle after staged battle. She almost believes that one of the uniformed men who wears a cross on his sleeve will turn his face to the audience in Toronto, in the dark, and that the face will be Jim’s.

  Tress reaches over and clenches Grania’s hand. She won’t let go; she nearly wrings it off. There is so much sadness in the film: a mother dies, a father dies, another mother from the village. There are caved-in buildings, and bodies buried under rubble. The youngest boy, the brother with the angelic face, makes Tress cry, but Grania’s favourite is the Disturber, the young woman who is full of life and up to mischief. The Disturber even helps to save the young lovers, in the end. Grania lip reads the wedding ceremony performed by the lovers themselves as they prepare to die in each other’s arms. Again and again, Tress, with no warning, wrenches Grania’s hand and, finally, when they are out on the street and standing in the fall sunlight again, Grania stops and faces her sister and, not sure of what she has missed, asks why the movie upset her so much at some times and not at others. And Tress says, “The music. The music was so intense, so rapid, my heart started to pound and I thought I would have to get up out of my seat and run out.”

  They go to a restaurant and have tea again and they both look as if they have come through the war themselves.

  On their way to Aunt Minna’s they buy postcards for Jim and Fry and everyone at home, even though they’ll be back in Deseronto before the cards arrive. They stop at the post office to buy stamps and a woman at the front of the line becomes agitated while they are waiting their turn. Grania watches the lips of the clerk behind the counter; he is speaking in anger to the woman. He makes a half-turn away and gestures rudely. The woman rushes out of the building.

  “What is it?” Grania whispers. “What happened?”

  “German,” Tress’s lips say.

  “The woman?”

  “He said so. She said she wasn’t but he wouldn’t believe her.”

  “I read his lips when she turned to go out,” Grania says. “He said, ‘I hate the Germans.’”

  That night, their last in Toronto, the sisters lie in bed, side by side, in the room that one of their cousins has vacated during their stay. So much has been seen in the big city, Grania goes over the wash of pictures in her mind. She is wide awake, and stares at the shadows in the unfamiliar room.

  Tress is still; she must be asleep. But she feels Tress’s foot press against her own. It happens again. She is uncertain at first, and then she realizes. Two taps. She waits, and taps back. She is one tap, Tress is two. They begin to tap foolish, meaningless messages with their feet and toes, and suddenly the mattress is shaking beneath their laughter. They carry on, tapping and laughing, and finally they stop, and go to sleep.

  The next day, they say goodbye to Aunt Minna and Uncle James and their cousins, and they travel home, and when they reach Belleville and climb down, ready to change trains, there is the peach-basket lady, waiting to climb up. The jar of maple syrup sticks up above the clothing; the contents of the basket look the same as they did a few days before.

  Grania reminds herself that a letter from Jim might have arrived while she was away. But she is glad there has been a diversion, glad that for a short time she and Tress were able to think of something other than Jim at the war and Kenan’s slow recovery.

  They stand on Main Street in front of the house and hotel, and they look at each other.

  “We’ve become serious,” Grania says, and they hug goodbye. “We hardly ever laugh any more.”

  But Tress is anxious to get home. She places a palm on Grania’s cheek and gives a half smile. She hugs her again and then she turns and hurries towards Kenan and her own house at the end of Main.

  We’ve missed each other, Grania thinks as she watches her sister go. But maybe things will be better now. We’ve missed each other and we seldom have a chance to laugh or have fun. All we do is wait out the war.

  Chapter 18

  If there is a sudden onset of what appears like a hard cold, one should go to bed, wrap warm, take a hot mustard foot-bath and drink copiously of hot lemonade. It is universally agreed that it is possible to perfect the powers of resistance of the human system so that it can throw off almost any infection, not excepting Spanish Influenza.

  The Napanee Express

  In the dream it was winter. Jim was outside, shaving from a tin cup partly filled with ice and partly with melted water. He was humming. There was snow all around, and he wore a thick jacket and a close-fitting knitted cap. When he finished shaving—he had no mirror—he turned and told her he was going to make a perfect angel in the snow. He fell hard, straight back. She was shocked when his arms did not reach out to break his fall and by the violence of the way he went down. He looked up at her and flailed his arms and legs to make wings. Then he stood. He moved his feet a few inches to change direction, and fell again. Another hard fall, another perfect angel. No jagged edges, no footsteps between. “I’m coming back,” his lips said while he lay there in the snow. “I told you before, Grania, I am coming back.”

  She had left the blind up the night before, and when she woke Saturday morning she could tell by the outside light that Mother must have slept in. Mother never slept in; she always came to Grania’s room to wake her. Every morning they were first up and walked through the passageway together to start breakfast at the hotel.

  Father was at Bompa’s farm. He had stayed away five days but would return today to take delivery of a new horse. The horse breaker was to arrive at noon, and that meant there would be plenty of men outside, around the back of the house. It would be busy at the hotel, too, with weekend steamer excursions stopping at the wharf. Bernard had said he would help out in the dining room at midday. Mrs. Brant had said she would come in, even though it was her day off. Grania thought of Mrs. Brant passing raisin cookies to her when she was a child. Now, she passed small paper-wrapped parcels to Mamo to store in the O’Shaughnessy trunk. But only when no one was around.

  Grania’s head and throat were aching, but she rose quickly and opened the door of her parents’ room. She went to her mother’s side, bent over her and put a hand on her shoulder.

  “Mother,” she said quietly. “Mother. We’ve slept in.”

  Mother opened her eyes, startled. She raised her head to look at the alarm clock, and sank back. “I forgot,” she said. “I forgot to wind it.” She reached up as if barely seeing Grania, and squeezed her hand.

  Grania was shocked to look down at her mother’s face like this and see her looking so vulnerable. Mother seemed to have shrunk since Patrick had left. The soft lines around her eyes and mouth tightened as soon as she pushed herself up and sat on the side of the bed.

  They had both gone to bed late. The night before, just after Grania had finished setting the tables for morning, she was leaving the dining room when a woman came running into the hotel, through the main entrance. She had a wide and ugly bruise across her left cheek and she kept looking back as if someone was about to come in behind her. Bernard came out of his office and spoke to her. Grania stood, waiting, wondering what she should do. She tried to read the woman’s lips, but it was difficult because the woman kept her head down and she wa
s crying. Bernard was trying to make sense of what had happened. He had a hand on the woman’s arm and was looking past her, out into the darkness of the street. He left her, and went to the door, and stood on the veranda outside and then came back in. He noticed Grania for the first time.

  “Tea, Grainy. Can you make some tea? Let’s bring her to the dining room. There’s no one in there.”

  The woman was perhaps forty, forty-five. Her hair was partly grey, partly black, and pinned back severely. Her cheek had begun to swell, and Grania went to the kitchen to get a sliver of ice from the ice box. She thought of something Mother had said not long ago, while speaking about a family in the town. “The husband,” she said, “does not treat his wife well.”