When it is time for Uncle Am to go and get the horses ready, Bompa Jack gives each of the children a gift: for Tress, a gold wishbone pin that belonged to Grandmother Sarah; for Patrick, a small carved horse that he can hold in his palm; for Grania, the camera, which is placed in her hands. She is not sure of all that has been said, but she is certain that the camera is now hers. Goodbyes are said quickly because it is Sunday morning and Uncle Am is going to take them directly to the church in Marysville on the way home. Once again, while the children are being hugged and kissed, Grania thinks she sees the word school.
Chapter 3
Vibration plays an important part—the voice, in some instances in the making of letters, coming from the chest, then from the throat, the nose, the chin and often times the top of the head.
Lecture, The Toronto Fair
August. The heat soaks into Grania’s skin. She and Mother board a steamer and they cross the bay and then Lake Ontario, a long journey of almost nine hours before they reach the state of New York. By the time they are met and reach Aunt Annie’s house in Rochester, it is time for Grania to go to bed. She follows Aunt Annie up the stairs, through a shadowed hall and into a room where Grania and Mother will share a narrow bed. Aunt Annie is Mother’s younger sister. She has eyes that look like Mamo’s, and her chin moves the same way Mother’s does when she talks. Aunt Annie and Mother have catching up to do, and it is late when Mother comes to bed.
In the morning, a taxicab is hired. It has a flat roof and high wheels and black sides, and Grania steps up behind Mother and sits as straight as she can, and hangs on to the hardness of the door while the taxicab lurches and jolts through the streets. They are driven to a modern office building where, on the second floor, they find the office of a special doctor who knows about ears. They are beckoned into the waiting room, and Grania sits on an uncomfortable chair that is too high for her, and she tries to look in every direction at once. When the doctor comes to the doorway, Mother flutters her hand to show Grania that she is to follow, that she is to sit up on the edge of a padded table inside a smaller room. The doctor helps her up. His skin is mottled; his cheeks are lumpy; his eyes are the brightest blue. Grania is relieved to see that his eyes are kind. While the doctor’s face is turned towards Mother, Grania inspects four charts along the nearest wall.
She is astonished to see that every chart contains an ear. A giant, coloured ear. Each huge ear is different from the next, each drawn to reveal a maze of meandering tunnels and shapes. Letters and words and arrows point into and out of the ears. Inside one, a black shape is coiled like a shaded snail. In another, a network of tightly packed tunnels resembles beehives that have been sliced open to reveal the activity inside. The tunnels in this chart shoot off in many directions. In the third ear, there is a shape like a bent wishbone. A green balloon—or is it a pea?—is stuck inside that ear’s passageway. The last ear holds the shape of a tiny horseshoe.
Grania has never before seen the inside of ears.
The doctor peers inside her own ears with a light. He taps a smooth stick along a series of bells that are suspended from a wooden frame on his desk. He picks up a small angular hammer like the one Grania has seen in Dr. Clark’s office in Deseronto. After that, something two-pronged and silver. The blue-eyed doctor raps this on top of the desk and places it behind Grania’s right ear. He taps again and holds it behind the left.
Thud. Thud.
While he is doing this she thinks, sea, or is it C, the word she sings when she is by herself. The doctor forces her attention back, and signals that she is to close her eyes. He holds something to her head and this time it sends vibrations into her skull.
She opens her eyes. He raises a hand to conceal his lips but she sees that his cheeks are moving. He lowers his hand to his side.
“Did you hear?” his lips ask. “Did you hear the word I made?”
He leans towards her. Mother leans forward in her chair. Four eyes are watching for the answer.
She pauses.
“Grania,” Mother’s lips say.
“No,” she says, with her voice. “No.”
But she feels. She feels the sea singing deep inside her head.
She watches Mother’s disappointment.
“She blocks us out,” Mother tells the doctor. “She keeps her focus away unless it pleases her to pay attention. She turns away from me.”
“She picks and chooses?”
“Exactly.”
“The girl is totally deaf,” he says. “There is nothing I can do. Scarlet fever has done this to thousands. She should be sent to a school with other deaf children. She is nine years old—no longer a little child. You don’t want to waste more time before beginning her proper education. She has already lost several years. We have a school here in Rochester—a good school. I could give you a referral, make inquiries on your behalf.”
“No.” Mother stands and faces Grania. Her lips say that they are returning to Canada. They are going home.
“It would be a simple matter to arrange a meeting,” the doctor says.
But Grania sees the set of Mother’s chin. Grania is glad they are going home.
They leave the office, but not before Mother pauses and turns back to face the doctor. Mother has remembered her manners.
“Thank you for seeing my child,” she says. “Thank you for your advice.”
“What are they saying? Is it about me?”
Father and Mother are in the parlour and Grania has been sent from the room. She and Tress are in the kitchen. Mamo is nowhere to be seen; she might be upstairs in her room or outside on the stoop. Tress lifts her chin, turns her head so that her ear closest to the parlour can hear.
Listen.
“Not loud enough,” the lips say. “I can’t hear what they’re saying.”
But Grania sees from Tress’s face that this is not true.
“Tell.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“Are they sending me away?”
Tress’s hand makes the signal for quiet.
“Tell,” Grania says again. She tries to make her voice whisper. “Are they sending me to deaf school?” Between her and Tress hangs a tiny puff of air. Now her voice changes.
“Tell.”
She feels her hands being lifted by Tress. There is a look on her sister’s face—what is it? Something that has not been there before. What? Something twisted, her mouth. Tress is looking far far back. Or maybe far far ahead.
“They’re sending you away to live at the school,” she says. Grania is frightened when she sees that Tress is crying and she, too, begins to cry. Her whole body is shaking. “The school in Belleville,” Tress says now. “The one for the deaf and dumb.”
It is Grania’s last day at home. After a special supper at the corner table in the hotel dining room, she and Mamo walk along the shore of the bay, hand in hand, heading towards the rocky place near the edge of the woods. Mamo carries the lumpy clock bag, its strap slung over her shoulder. When they return home, Mamo pulls Grania to her lap in the rocking chair and they rock together for a while, and Mamo blows into her ear.
Father comes to the house to get her and takes her to his office in the hotel and sits her on his knee. She knows that he has been outside this evening, because his sleeves smell like stable and horse. He gives her a hug and a kiss and they sit quietly together. Carlow is on the floor and puts one paw over his pirate eye and Grania says “YEW,” to make him feel better. Father’s moustache has been trimmed by Grew and, when he begins to talk to her, Grania understands most of what he says. He tells her that if she is afraid of the dark at school, she should say her fears out loud. She should send them out into the dark.
Grania is surprised. How does Father know that she is afraid of the dark? Maybe Father knows about the ankle rope, too.
“Say your fears into the dark, my darling, and they will go away,” his lips tell her.
Grania tries to understand and she nods and smells Father’s t
obacco smell and he takes her by the hand through the passageway, back to the house.
Now Grania is in her own bed, tucked in by Mother. It is late and she thinks about Patrick and Bernard in their beds in their shared room at the end of the hall. She thinks of Mamo in her room, of her parents on the other side of the bedroom wall. Do they have fears? She thinks of everyone in the family sending their thoughts out into the dark. Does everyone want her to go away?
She pulls hard at the ankle rope, her lifeline, the ribbon of night language she will no longer have with Tress. She senses stillness across the room. She moves her foot. No response. She tugs the rope again. Tress is suddenly beside her, standing at the edge of the bed, leaning over and pointing to her own lips.
“Stop,” she says. “I have to sleep, Graw. I’m tired.”
Grania closes her eyes and commands her body to be still. If she moves too much, Tress will detach herself and slip the end of the rope over her foot and off. If that happens, Grania will be cut adrift, cast out into the floating dark.
Her leg tenses while Tress returns to her bed on the other side of the rag rug. The pattern of leaves outside the window flutters against the shade. She has to keep Tress attached but she also has to fall asleep. She tries to dull her brain but she can’t turn off the pictures in her head.
She gets up, risking Tress’s anger.
Tress is still awake. “What’s the matter now?” Instinctively she raises her head so that Grania can see her lips in the zigzag of light.
“I can’t sleep. It’s too dark.”
“Tell your brain to stop thinking.”
“What?”
“That’s what I do. It’s easy. I tell my brain to stop thinking and then I go to sleep.”
Grania returns to her bed, but her brain won’t stop thinking. The more she tries, the more her brain creates pictures. She drifts in and out of half sleep. She finds herself inside a sea of tunnels. She follows hand signals and painted arrows and the sluggish movement of snails. Her ears are below water but she fights against going completely under. The seashore girl at the end of the Sunday book drifts by, lifting her head off the page to look at Grania as she passes. She is wearing her hat and sash and dress, and she is still waiting to be rescued. A flotilla of earless ladies with willowy waists and trailing skirts sails by. Oscar, the cutout man with the black pointy toes, floats past in his catalogue underwear. Despite his stout belly, he does not seem in danger of sinking. Grandfather O’Shaughnessy’s body surfaces, turning over and over in the rolled-up sheet. The cutout girl in her new bathing suit dips down and pops up through the waves, but she is alone and makes no sign that she has seen the others.
Grania thrashes soundlessly in her bed as she feels the press of water from above. She forces her arms and legs to move. She rises to the surface. In the morning she wakes and finds herself in bed with her sister, snuggled close. Warm and covered, safely tucked, deep down inside the blankets of Tress’s bed. Mamo sits in her rocker in the parlour, alone in the house. She has slept poorly, the night before. Bernard is next door at the hotel, Patrick with Mrs. Brant in the hotel kitchen; Tress is at school. It is a fine September day but Mamo does not go out to the veranda. Even so, with the windows open, she is alert to a change in the air. Autumn has begun. In the early morning, she placed her gift inside the child’s new canvas trunk before the trunk was loaded onto the back of the wagon. Agnes and Dermot have not yet returned from Belleville.
Mamo feels as if the creases in her face won’t yield, as if her lips won’t speak. She can do nothing but sit by herself with the school newspaper, The Canadian Mute, on her lap, and think of the child during each step of her journey.
The child, the child. She looks down at the paper and reads: “Every child should get a letter from home at least every two weeks. Some pupils seldom, if ever, hear from home and this is shameful. On the other hand, it is better for parents not to write too often, as it keeps the mind of the pupil from its work.”
Mamo’s stationery is ready in the drawer of her bureau, upstairs. Wearily, she turns the newsprint page.
“Every year we are sent an exceptionally bright lot of lads and lasses and, if their parents will give us time, we hope to make manly men and noble women of them.”
Mamo sighs. She reaches for and unfolds a separate sheet, the official instructions sent from the school. For the third time, she examines this as if it is a document from a foreign land:
The Ontario Institution for the Deaf and Dumb All deaf mutes between the age of seven and twenty, not being deficient in intellect, and free from contagious diseases, who are bona fide residents of the Province of Ontario, will be admitted as pupils. Length of schooling is seven years, or in the case of a late arrival, until the student reaches the age of twenty. There will be a vacation of nearly three months during the summer of each year. Parents, guardians or friends who are able to pay will be charged the sum of $50 per year for board. Tuition, books and medical attendance will be furnished free. A qualified physician visits the Institution every day and a trained nurse is always in attendance. There is a well-equipped hospital where every sick child is given the best of treatment.
Deaf mutes whose parents, guardians or friends are unable to pay the amount charged for board will be admitted free, but clothing must be furnished by parents or friends.
At the present time the trades of Printing, Carpentering, Shoemaking and Baking are taught to boys. Female pupils are instructed in General Domestic Work, Tailoring, Dressmaking, Sewing, Knitting, the use of Sewing Machines and such Ornamental and Fancy Work as may be desirable. Manual Training in woodwork for boys, and Domestic Science for girls have been introduced.
Good, says Mamo to herself, thinking of her own skills and how she learned them in the old country, taught by the generations before her. Good. All of this will help Grania in her future.
Most pupils receive training in the sign language every afternoon. Articulation classes are held between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m.
When pupils assemble in the classrooms each morning, the teachers will open by prayer. At one o’clock, the pupils assemble in the chapel. After prayers, they will be dismissed in a quiet and orderly manner and they will again proceed to their regular classes. Prayers are those prescribed for use in the Public Schools of Ontario. Methodist, Anglican and Catholic pupils will be taken to the appropriate church in the city every Sunday morning. Catholic pupils also receive religious instruction Friday afternoons from 2 to 2:30 p.m.
The next is difficult to read and more difficult to know. Mamo has read this part twice and has discussed it with Agnes and Dermot. She knows it is a rule that must be complied with, but it bangs in discord inside her head as she forces herself to read again:
Pupils will not be permitted to go home for Christmas. If children are taken away at that time they will not be permitted to return until next fall. There is a good reason for this rule. It is impossible for a majority of the pupils to go home for Christmas—the distances are too great and the cost too much. If some went home, others would be rendered discontented and unhappy. Moreover, the work in the classroom would be greatly interfered with. If all or a large number went home, some would be almost sure to bring back contagious diseases, as frequently did happen in years gone by before this rule was made. Of course it is a great deprivation for you not to have your child with you at Christmas but this is one of the sacrifices love must make.
It is enough. An institution of rules and more rules. Mamo lets the papers slide to the floor. How can she not see the child for nine full months? And Christmas away! She herself has pushed the parents to send the child to school. She closes her eyes and makes no attempt to stop the tears from pouring freely down her cheeks.
Chapter 4
A number of years ago I visited a large school for the deaf, and taught all the pupils to use their voices. In a few cases the effect was decidedly unpleasant, the voice resembling somewhat the cry of a peacock.
Alexander Graham Bell
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Belleville, Ontario
After the heavy doors close behind her, she is taken to the dormitory and shown to her bed. It is the second Wednesday of September. At the residential school that houses 271 students, Grania O’Neill is last to be admitted, last to arrive. She looks around her and begins to cry, and she cries for the next two weeks. “Don’t cry,” say the adult lips around her. “Be a good girl and don’t cry.”
No one but the hearing staff has to listen to the outflow of wails and miserable snufflings that escape her body. During the last three days of this period, she cries without sound. Her classmates see but do not interfere, remembering their own arrivals. There have been other new students and other tears, but Grania is the only child who cries without let-up for two weeks.
On September twenty-seventh the house mother pulls down the covers to wake Grania as she does every morning, and continues on to the other beds. Ceiling lights are on. It is five-fifteen. Grania has been dreaming that Father is in the doorway of his office. His lips distort as he calls out, “Where are you, my darling?” He turns away as Grania wakes, even though Grania shouts after him and tries to make him see that she is not lost.
She sits up, leans against the metal bed frame and decides that she is finished with crying. She flattens her unhappiness the way she and Tress once pressed leaves inside Tress’s book The Faeries and placed it high on the closet shelf. She gets up and follows the other girls to the hall and to the bathroom. She never sheds another tear at the institution, not during all the years she is a student. The whites of her eyes redden severely from time to time, but never again is Grania known to cry.
What she does not see is the bound ledger, the Descriptive Register of the institution, where several facts were recorded the day of her admission.
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