Deafening

by Frances Itani

  Date of Birth: May 25, 1896

  Birthplace: Deseronto, Ontario

  Cause of deafness: Scarlet fever, age five

  Hearing loss: Total

  She was vaccinated against the smallpox in 1903, has no offensive disease, and there are no other cases of deafness in the family. Her father, last name O’Neill, is the owner of a Deseronto hotel.

  The final questions on the left side of the ledger are:

  What are the number and names of other children in the family, including the mute?

  What is the child’s natural capacity? Bright, dull, stupid or idiotic?

  Beside the last question, written with a fine nib in black ink, is the single word: Bright.

  An extra note added later, in blue ink, states that the child has spent one year at a Regular Hearing School and that she has received some home schooling. “She seems particularly adept,” the note continues, “at lip reading.”

  A four digit ledger number, which will be her number throughout the remaining years of her childhood, is entered beside Grania’s name. Grania tries to read the unfamiliar lips of strangers but sees only faces, moving cheeks and bobbing chins. This is so frightening, she pulls farther inside herself and does not attempt to use her voice. Not in the way she is used to speaking to her family. At home, she can say anything and be understood.

  On a Thursday evening, after the second week of tears and surrounded by a sea of faces and a whirr of hands, she follows the other children to the dining hall. She sits at the table, takes two bites of meat from her plate and finds the meat to have a strange taste. What she reads from lips around her, lips trying to be helpful, is that she is eating something called Swit steak—pounded beef cooked in broth and catsup. She has never eaten beef prepared this way at home. In the hotel dining room there is catsup at every table, but Mother never mixes it with meat in the cooking. It was Grania’s job to fill the catsup containers. She thinks of Tress helping her tilt the big jar to fill the small ones, and when she thinks of Tress she lays her head on the cloth-covered table. She knows instinctively that if she stays awake she will cry. But she has made up her mind not to cry again. Some grief is so big, it has to be held in, Mamo has told her. She falls asleep beneath the conical rays of light reflected from the lamps that hang from the ceiling. One of the older girls at the table wakes her and signs, using the hand language. Grania has learned some signs from the girls in her dormitory—it has been necessary to learn quickly—but she has no idea what is being communicated now.

  She looks around in panic, and what she sees is a large vast room filled with strangers. It strikes her at this moment that she might as well be in an orphanage, her abandonment is so complete. There is no Tress to be her go-between, no older brother, no smaller brother, no Father, no Mother, no Mamo to be her comfort. Mother kept her at home, and now that she is nine years old, she has been sent away. Mamo is part of the conspiracy that has brought her here. Mamo wants Grania to be away at school. “You need the schooling,” she told Grania when she held her tightly on her lap before she left home. “You need to learn what other deaf children are learning.”

  Grania thinks of the heavy closed doors at the entrance of the school, the marble staircase that leads to a wider landing. She will never escape through the big doors by herself. She stares at her plate until the girls are dismissed from the table and she follows them out of the room and outside and across the path to her dorm. While the others prepare for evening study, the quiet period before lights out, she sits on the edge of her bed and calls up every detail of her arrival two weeks earlier, and of her parents’ simultaneous departure.

  When Father’s horses had pulled up to the main entrance, Grania was helped from her seat and waited while the new canvas trunk was hoisted down behind her. A group of curious girls stood in a clump at one side of the heavy double doors and stared. Each girl had a flat bow in her hair, pinned butterfly fashion at the back of her head. Grania did not want to look at the staring girls, and she turned away. The sun glared like a yellow eye. The horse nearest Grania looked on in sympathy. Horse, eye, sun, she said to herself, storing the pictures. Father, Mother, doors, dark. But she would not be going home to report to Mamo. Mamo was in Deseronto. Grania took in a long slow breath. The scent of the air had changed. Without warning, autumn was moving in to take summer’s place.

  What happened next, Grania is no longer sure of. She and her parents might have walked through the big doors. Or an adult from the school might have been standing outside the building to greet them. Did the doors bang shut behind her? Did Father and Mother say goodbye beside the wagon—or inside, near the marble staircase? The doors had made a sound. She was startled. Or has she imagined the sound?

  What she remembers is that Mother leaned over to kiss her goodbye. Mother’s dark eyes showed something new, and Grania had hoped, for a moment, that Mother would grab her by the wrist and take her home again. Then, Father was hugging Grania and his lips were saying “Goodbye, my darling.”

  She has no picture in her mind of her parents stepping back up into the wagon.

  One thing she does know for certain. Although the distance by horse and wagon—or steamer, or train, or even automobile if her family were to own one—was just over twenty miles, she might as well be two hundred miles from the family she would not see again until summer of the following year.

  Her trunk was not taken to the girls’ residence where, within moments of her parents’ departure, she was led by the tall and gaunt house mother, Miss O’Shaughnessy, who has the same name as Mamo. Instead, the trunk was taken to a lower room, where its contents were fumigated. Later the same evening, her clothes, reeking of fumigant, were brought to the dorm. Along with these, she unpacked her horn comb—a gift from Patrick; an olive-wood hairbrush from Bernard; a matching hand mirror from Tress; the black box camera from Bompa Jack, and one precious roll of film. Her parents had given her a small purse containing two shining fifty-cent pieces. The King, wearing his crown, was on one side of each coin, a wreath of leaves on the other. The spending money was turned over to the house mother, to be administered by the school.

  A posed photograph of Mamo in its own cardboard frame, taken in Deseronto’s Fairbairn Studio, was tucked inside Grania’s Sunday book and signed with x’s and o’s, which Grania knew to be kisses and hugs. The photograph was new, a surprise. In it, Mamo was seated on a chair with a tall back. She was wearing her high-necked blouse and her knitted vest. The white strands of her hair were pinned with long hairpins that Grania knew to be there but that were invisible in the photograph. Grania stared at Mamo’s hands as if seeing them for the first time. The raised veins, the lumps and arthritic nodes on her fingers, were all captured within the frame.

  But Mamo’s face was the same. Her eyes looked directly at Grania. If Grania moved, the eyes followed. On Mamo’s face was love. The same love that had moved back and forth between them the night of the Great Fire. Grania wiggled her fingers to herself the way Mamo did when she told the name story, the story of the fire.

  Mamo had been careful to tuck the photo of herself beside a page of the Sunday book that Grania knew well. In the picture, a girl of Grania’s age was wearing a dress and buckled shoes. She held in her hand a triangular sailor’s hat that had been folded from newspaper, and she was perched on a wide plank stretched across the mouths of two open barrels. A boy, holding a cardboard sword and wearing an eye patch, was standing on the grass nearby. The girl was staring with a fierce look out of the page and did not seem in the least to be afraid. Grania knew the caption by heart: Dulcie is a very brave girl, said the pirate.

  Grania thinks of the walk she and Mamo had taken the evening before she left home. They’d walked along the shore of the bay to the rocky place near the edge of the woods. The place where they carried the burlap bag from the O’Shaughnessy trunk. When things get bad.

  Grania, sitting on the edge of her narrow school bed, commands herself to remember.

  She soon
learns that even though she is encouraged every day to use her voice with her teacher, she is barely understood. She resolves to keep her voice inside, not to let it out. But her teacher, Miss Amos, won’t settle for that. She taps Grania on the shoulder, watches her lips, brings Grania’s attention back to her own lips to see the shapes of the words she is trying to say. Grania has been put into a mid-level group because she is quick to lip read, and because of the home schooling with Mamo. It has been decided that she will be taught a mixture of oral and manual training.

  Miss Amos instructs her in the single-hand alphabet, which Grania, already knowing her printed letters, has no trouble learning. She also learns to use the signing space in front of her neck and upper chest. Signs made at the lower chest and waist are harder to see. She tries to watch faces, as well as hands that are in motion around her. “Keep eye contact,” her teacher insists. If Grania looks away, once again Miss Amos brings her attention back.

  Miss Amos, in her twenties, has dark brown hair in a style rolled back from her forehead. Every day she wears an ankle-length panelled skirt, a long-sleeved blouse, and a narrow tie that hangs from neckline to waist. Every day, the necktie is a different colour: Kelly green, old rose, heliotrope, fawn, cerise. Miss Amos is eager to teach, eager to have the children learn. Sometimes she rolls the sleeves of her blouse right up her thin arms and past her angular elbows, as if she is digging in to teach the children one more important thing. She delights in their accomplishments. She is as proud as they are, when the children achieve.

  Along with Grania, there are eleven other children in the room. Eight of these know the sign language. They signal to one another with animation; they prance like mimes. Grania watches the expressions on their faces change as rapidly as the messages on their lightning fingers and hands. She begins to learn signs for food: her small closed fist raps her temple for cabbage; knuckles rub an imaginary tear from the corner of her eye for onion; two fingers tap-tap the back of her hand for potato. She learns to cut a hand wedge for Sunday pie; she grinds her palms together for cheese. During a meal in the dining hall, when she sees a spider on the wall, she crosses one wrist over the other and sends her fingers scurrying through the air before her, delighting the others at the table.

  She begins to send signals out slowly from her body, but she is frustrated by the flap and flurry of hands that face her when signals try to come back in. At times she sees nothing more than a rapid blur and cannot differentiate even one sign from another. Her eye movements are not quick enough to catch up to the speed of the hands and fingers around her.

  Instead, she pays attention to lips as she has done at home. But in the classroom, Miss Amos wants more: she wants Grania to anticipate, to see a signal that a word is about to form, to guess what it will mean as a whole. This works in slow motion with Miss Amos, whom Grania now tries to please, but away from the classroom the other children expect her to understand not lips but hands, and at their speed. If Grania does not understand, she is left out.

  The only place where she can move lips and hands freely, in any way she wishes, is in the chapel. During daily prayers, surrounded by other deaf children, there is no one to hear or notice the babble of nonsense words that Grania’s voice speaks, or the meaningless signs her hands create. She begins to look forward to the regular time when she can stand in the chapel and blather anything at all. Every day, she comes away from the chapel feeling refreshed.

  And then, unexpectedly, one Saturday as she walks through the dark panelled corridor on her way into the dining hall, she watches spelling fingers that face her on the way out. The fingers spell C-E-D-R-I-C. Cedric is on duty, an older student warns. Which means: Behave during the meal.

  Mr. Cedric is a teacher as well as the editor of the school paper, The Canadian Mute. He is not unfair, but he expects good behaviour when he is in charge. It is only when Grania finishes eating and leaves the table that she feels a delayed rush of triumph. She realizes that when she walked through the doorway on her way in, she understood the finger-spelled name.

  The next day, missives that once tumbled incomprehensibly through air become single words strung together, sentences she can understand. A language is taking shape, one in which, haltingly, she is beginning to take part. She misses and misunderstands, but puts meaning—right or wrong—to words that come at her in sign. Her hands, to her surprise, and jerkily at first, begin to send ideas out. Her face and body punctuate; her eyes receive. She is falling into, she is entering a new world. She is joining the larger conversation of hands.

  Grania now knows that her deafness will always have more significance at school than it ever did at home. The teachers are constantly bringing the fact of it to her attention. It is their mission to try to fix the damage deafness has inflicted upon her speech; relentlessly, they try to remedy and repair. She is marched back and forth between classes. She is taught by one teacher with signing hands and other teachers who know only how to speak. The new matron of the school, who arrived shortly after Grania, knows no more of the sign language than she does. The children watch and laugh and give encouragement while Matron also attempts to learn.

  Grania sees hands that are open and relaxed, and fingers that are stiff and stuck as tightly together as if they are glued. In class with Miss Amos, she tries to train herself to feel her voice, to keep the measure of its volume. As all but one of her teachers are hearing, she has to take care that her voice does not blurt out and make a hard noise, a bad noise.

  Through all of this, and knowing that her Deseronto home has been stored in a private place buried inside herself along with her tears, she slowly begins to feel that she has sisters and brothers, more than she could ever have imagined. The difference is that these children, almost three hundred of them, are like herself. Sisters and brothers who are not afraid to raise a hand and ask a question of a teacher like Miss Amos, with her Kelly green tie and her rolled-back hair.

  Grania creates words silently inside her mouth. Her teacher is telling the story of Sammy and the monkey and turning over cards that hold pictures of a monkey dressed in a waistcoat and a flat round hat. Miss Amos writes on lines ruled across the chalkboard.

  Sammy bought a monkey.

  He sold the poor monkey because it was sick.

  When the story is over, she taps her hand rhythmically against her side while Grania and eleven other pupils in the room try to chant

  p as in pie and

  b as in buy

  and m as in my.

  And Grania slaps the side of her own dress.

  In the afternoons, they take turns sitting in pairs on side-by-side chairs that are pulled up to a low table that has a rectangular tilting mirror attached to the back. Grania’s partner is Nola, who is also nine years old and who has been deaf from meningitis since she was two. The girls pucker their lips, leaving a small opening between; they growl at the mirror, showing teeth; they open and shut their mouths. When they finish their turn at the table, they return to the front of the class and stand at Miss Amos’ desk and blow out candles for P as fast as the teacher can relight them. More drill, day in, day out, week after week, the class recites

  oo

  as in boo

  as in boom

  as in whom.

  Wooms, Grania thinks. The password.

  Poom, she thinks.

  Her private word from the dugout under the wharf. Someone made a stink, but who? She thinks of Kenan who is going to marry Tress some day, and Tress herself, and their joking friend Orryn, and how they all laughed inside the hideout and tried to teach her to say the forbidden word fart, but Grania refused and made her own word: Poom.

  Where did the word come from? She laughs to herself.

  Did she laugh out loud? Miss Amos is frowning.

  The tongue draws back inside the mouth

  ah, bah

  and bow-wow

  and huff muff.

  And she is so tired.

  The days run together and she is instructed to u
se more voice, more breath, not so much breath. She holds fingers to her teacher’s lips and feels the puff of air with beat and peat. And places a hand on her teacher’s throat for fox and flax.

  “Lightly, now,” her teacher tells her. “Feel the word. Now to my throat, back to my lips. Let the shape of the word fall into your fingers. Scoop it up with your hand.”

  I for ice

  See the rice.

  See the mice.

  “Voice, use voice.” Miss Amos’ lips shape the instruction, again and again. “Work at control. You must control your voice.”

  The children print careful words across their slates. They learn to pass sound from one pair of lips to another. They shout into the air, test their own throats, lips and tongues. They roar out of the silence inside them.

  On Sunday afternoon, Grania accompanies the other children to the assembly hall to see the magic lantern views of “The Life of Christ.” Most of what is signed by Mr. Norris, the teacher who shows the views, is understood. Grania sits in the partially lighted room and is amazed to see each of the stories of Jesus presented in a picture. She thinks of the sampler on her wall at home: God’s eye for my seeing, God’s ear for my hearing, and wonders if Saint Patrick might have been deaf and used God’s ear to hear.

  After supper, when she is back in her dormitory, Grania organizes and reorganizes every item she owns. At the bottom of her drawer are two letters she has received from home, one from Mamo and one from Tress. Each is a page long and has been unfolded and read and folded again. Mother will be writing next, Tress told her in the last letter. Grania checks the contents of her shared cupboard, and her shelf in the communal bathroom down the hall. She has a hook for her towel, her own cup, a place for toothbrush and soap. In her room, she arranges and rearranges stockings and underwear, two nightgowns, an extra pair of bootlaces, handkerchiefs, and wide ribbons for her hair. The ribbons are a gift from Aunt Maggie, who brought them to the house and buffed them over a lightbulb on one of the parlour lamps to get the store wrinkles out.