Deafening

by Frances Itani

  They stood, face to face. He was taller by four inches, and she looked up. As if in a dance, they turned, back to back. He tipped his head to rest against hers and she felt his wet hair. Then, they were face to face again. He placed both hands on her swept-up hair, and he hummed softly. She felt the hum and leaned forward. She put a hand to his throat. His skin was cool. He was always singing or humming. She pulled away to see if he wanted to speak.

  She had taught him the alphabet and some of the sign language and he could make slow words, but they had also begun to create a language of their own. It arose as naturally as the love between them, an invented code no one would ever break.

  The tiniest flicker of her index finger resting against her dress and he moved to her side.

  His name-sign, her gift to him—a C turning over to become an H that tapped once over her heart. Chim.

  And he, delighting in the new language of hands, returned a G close to his own heart.

  When they were visiting Tress’s town friends in Deseronto, he brushed a fingertip over his lips and signalled across the room. Now I’m going to take you home. But it meant something else, too. Grania’s cheeks reddened furiously when he made this public-private display, though no one else had noticed.

  In the tower apartment they lay on the blue blanket, the parlour curtains pulled back so that they could see the night sky. He lay beside her in the dark and she turned on her right side, where she could tuck in closely.

  She wanted to talk. The room was dark unless there was a moon, but she did not need the moon. She closed her eyes and raised the fingers of her left hand to his lips. Though at first he was astonished, he understood and began to speak. His careful words fell into her fingertips and she whispered back and they conversed like this, side by side. She had been well taught; her hands and body remembered the countless times at school when she had sat on a chair facing her teacher.

  “Place your fingertips over my mouth. Lightly now. Feel the word. Now to my throat, back to the lips. Let the shape of the word fall into your fingers. Scoop it up with your hand.”

  He had never known a language that so thoroughly encompassed love.

  She had never felt so safe.

  He had quickly learned that she did not need full sentences in order to understand, that her ability to focus the immediate was extraordinary, that with lightning speed she was able to fill in the gaps. He saw query on her face, her reddish brows forming the barely discernible frown.

  He watched her silence.

  But Grania knew when she was being watched.

  “Tell me,” he said. He wanted everything. He watched her brown eyes focus on his face, her glance as it darted to the background, right, left, back to his lips. What did she see? He wanted to know. “Tell me, so I’ll know. About being deaf. Start with the worst thing.” He leaned towards her, listening hard.

  They were sitting on the blue blanket where they had brought their trays and eaten their breakfast. They could not be seen from the street below. The late-autumn sun warmed the room and he saw the varying shades of red in her hair as light fell across her.

  “The worst thing?” She thought for a moment. “Not having information that everyone else has. No—worse is when information is withheld—the smallest detail—by someone who thinks it isn’t important enough to pass on.”

  “More. Something I can’t know.”

  She did not have to ponder this.

  “The way I see the world.”

  “No one sees so much.”

  “The way I see is divided. Into things that move and things that don’t move.”

  She saw the surprise on his face, watched him stow the information. This pleased her. “You could not have known that.”

  “I do now.”

  “It keeps me alive,” she said. “Movement and shadow. I rely on those. Mamo helped me, but I learned by myself, too. Maybe when I was a child—instinct.” A horse moves, a swing, an auto, a gate, a cutter, a door, a branch in the woods, a running child. Wind moves; it lifts, even sweeps objects from place to place. She thought of Miss Marks during senior class at school, trying to explain the various meanings of sweep.

  “The first time I saw you,” he said, “last year, in the bandage room at the hospital, I walked up from behind and didn’t realize you were deaf. But you didn’t move. No part of your body moved. You should have been surprised when you saw me. Anyone else would have jumped, they would have been startled.”

  She watched and weighed the words. Always a time lag. “I remember. But you were not a threat. Not in that place. From the side, I could see Miss MacKay’s eyes flicker. When you approached.”

  She reached across and touched his shoulder. They were face to face. She slipped her hand into his. “You tell something, something I can’t know about you.”

  Tell.

  He laughed. “You’ll never know how I sing. Sometimes I wish you could hear me.”

  “I do know you can sing. You know the words to all the songs. Everyone tells me about your voice. You sing every time you’re near a piano. Your Grandfather Lloyd played the fiddle—you told me. Mamo likes to hear you play piano and sing when you are home—parents’ home—with me.” She corrected herself. Married woman. “You sing when you’re beside me. You hum most of the time. You think I don’t know?”

  “You can’t know. You’ll never hear me sing,” he teased. “Did you hear me hum the ‘Sparkling Waltzes’ when we danced at our wedding at Bompa Jack’s?”

  “I felt the hum. I watch your words. I see your fingers on the keys. I feel your song. I follow your body when we dance. That’s how I listen. I listen to your body.”

  They did not talk about him leaving. She did not agree to the silence; there was simply nothing to say. He had finished his work with Dr. Whalen; he had stayed to help his uncle; he was going to war. She believed that his Uncle Alex had exacted the promise to delay his departure in hopes that the war would be over by now. But the war was not over.

  They did not think beyond the end of their time in the tower. They knew that on departure day, Jim would travel to Belleville and leave by the eastbound train. Eventually, when he reached the coast, he would cross the sea.

  What Grania had to do was believe that he would come back. Once he was over there, he would write. He would not withhold information. Withholding meant keeping her out and that would be worse than everything else put together. He would keep back only what he would not be permitted to tell. If he wrote enough to enable her to create a picture of him there, she would be able to keep him close. He knew her in her setting, and that was what he would take away with him.

  He wanted to tell her about sound.

  “Ask,” he said. “Ask what you want to know.”

  But she had no questions about sound. She would have to make some up. She knew he wanted to understand. She opened one of the narrow windows and saw that a new wind was blowing in off the bay. The tips of the trees that lined the street were waving in a commotion. A ruckus was like a commotion; Mamo had told her that. Father used to say to Grania and Tress and Patrick, when they were children, “Don’t make so much ruckus”—and that meant noise.

  “The leaves,” she said—she was making the effort, to please him—“do they make a wild noise when they are like this?”

  “Not exactly the leaves. The wind howls but not the leaves.”

  She came back to the blanket and curled her feet under her, and wondered. The wind howls. How many things did she not know? Many. But she knew that wolves howled along the edge of the woods near her grandfather’s farm on the Ninth. Bompa Jack had gone outside and shot one with his rifle during the night because it kept coming too close to the barn. He told her that on a clear night the cry of the wolf was like the crying of a baby.

  “Bompa Jack,” she said, “when the wolves howl, he feels their voices up the back of his neck.”

  “Different kind of howl. The wind howls but it can change its sound. It all depends.”

 
It would, she thought. She rested one index finger over the other, making the sign, and lowered her hands to her lap. It all depends. Sound was always more important to the hearing.

  At night, they lay in each other’s arms, a light cover over them. The parlour curtains remained open so that if there was a moon, it could show itself. Grania positioned herself so that she could lie with her head on the soft part of Jim’s upper abdomen, just below his chest. For a while he sang softly so that she could feel his song. She knew the spot where it began, the origin of song, the onset of breath. The words circled on a thin column of air but were also connected to the low resonant place where she laid her head.

  She was certain that she could identify Jim’s heartbeat from all heartbeats. It pulsed to her skin, and the rhythm of their breathing merged. He tucked an arm beneath her shoulders and her hair. It was a wonder to him, the way their bodies curled to each other after lovemaking; the way they fitted perfectly together in deepest sleep.

  Grania had just returned from her work at the Red Cross office, where she volunteered one afternoon a week. After Jim’s departure, she would work two. Jim had been up inside the clock tower and had worked at jobs around the building most of the day. For a brief moment when she came into the apartment, they felt as if they were in their own place. The night before, they had talked about having a home after the war, after he would come back. They would have a baby. Two babies, or three. They had allowed themselves to speak of that. And they both laughed when Grania told Jim that he would have to listen for their sounds, that he would have to describe every noise their babies would make. Even their cries, their early cries.

  Jim hung up her coat for her. “Is it good,” he said, “to come home? To turn your attention off, relax? So you don’t have to be alert to everyone’s lips around you?”

  “No,” she said, but she felt the word rise as she was about to explain. Control the voice, said the other voice in her head, the one that slipped in unbidden. “No. Most of the time, I am turned off. Only when I want to make the effort, that’s when I turn on—that’s when I’m most alert.”

  She unpinned her hat and moved towards him. But she saw his surprise. Dulcie comes up for air and sees the look on his face. She thought of the earless cutout girl who wore a bathing suit and used to live in the closet drawer next to the catalogue ladies.

  Once again, Jim had misunderstood what he thought he knew. It was a mystery then, the silence where she lived. Somewhere between wilful and involuntary attention. Where, despite frustrations large and small, she pulled into her own space.

  She saw his disappointment.

  “It’s what I learned in childhood,” she said. “It’s easy to let things fall away. To choose what to attend to and what not.”

  He saw how comfortable she was in her inner place, how private and peaceful. With him, she allowed this to be seen. When she wanted to focus on the world outside herself, she stopped and made sense of the situation. After that, she let in the extra cues.

  The glimpse she allowed was enough. The inner place was one he could never know. It was the source of her strength, her stillness; he saw that. Despite all that she told him, despite all of the questions she tried to answer, he understood that he was outside of that place. But when he was away from her, he felt his own strength move towards her, in the same way that he felt hers moving towards him.

  “What else?” he said. They were walking along Main Street, arm in arm, in the afternoon sun.

  “When there are more than two people in a room, if hearing people are talking and change the subject, the deaf person in the room doesn’t know. We are back in the old conversation, left behind.”

  “Explain.” He turned towards her.

  “We don’t hear the asides, the sudden shifts. We can only watch one pair of lips at a time. If someone speaks when we’re not looking, well…”

  He nodded, taking in what he had never known.

  Grania carried her box camera in her free hand. Near the end of town, they passed the side-by-side verandas of the hotel and her parents’ home. How strange to be an outsider looking in. Someone of, yet not of, her own family.

  No one could be seen inside; the hall and parlour lights were off. From the street she saw only shadows and the dark angle of the piano. One evening, after she and Jim had had supper with the family, everyone—even Father—walked back through the passageway and into the parlour, and Jim sat on the round stool before the piano and played. He did not need sheet music; he could play by ear. His grandmother had taught him the notes when he was a child, and he had learned to chord by himself. His long fingers looked as if they were floating across the keys. Grania had stood beside him and watched song come from his lips. She’d placed one hand on his shoulder and the other on the top panel of the piano. Her body had stilled as she’d allowed his music to enter her.

  From the street, it was easy to imagine the rooms inside the house and where everyone would be. She created pictures of Mamo, Mother, Tress, Father, Bernard, Patrick, confident of what each would be doing at four o’clock on a weekday afternoon. She tightened her grip on Jim’s arm. She was independent now. Married woman. But during the summer, when Jim travelled to Deseronto to speak to her parents, there had been barely restrained conversations that Grania thought of as: What is going to happen next?

  “Of course you will come home.” That was Mother. “You can’t live somewhere alone as a married woman while Jim is away at the war. Where would you live? What if a stranger came to your door? What if we had to contact you? What if you were in danger?”

  Danger? Grania hadn’t given a thought to danger. She had always shared a room with Fry in the residence. She had planned to stay on and work at the school hospital. It was Jim who was heading into danger. She had looked to Mamo for support but, for once, Mamo sided with Mother.

  Mamo had different arguments. The hotel needed help. Another of Father’s employees had left for the war. Bernard was already working long hours in the afternoons and evenings. Mother and Mrs. Brant needed help in the kitchen and dining room. Mrs. Brant was getting older and didn’t move quickly any more. Mamo’s arthritis bothered her and she couldn’t help out the way she used to. And Mother was tired. Grania knew that Mother had lost weight. Her face was gaunt, her apron tied tighter. She seemed to be worried all the time.

  The final argument was that Tress was moving home as soon as Kenan left for the war. Grania and Tress would share their old room again, sleep across from each other in their old single beds, live there as if they had never left. Bernard and Patrick stayed out of the discussions, but everyone wanted Grania to come home.

  Grania understood the real reason—the one never stated. No one quite believed that she could take charge of her own life. Mother had finally agreed to the wedding, and Grania had agreed to come home. She refused to delay her marriage until after the war, even though that was what Mother wanted. The price of Grania’s refusal was that she would move from one area of protection to another. Even so, Mamo had blessed the marriage. She had made an emphatic announcement to the family when Mother was arguing and Father was silent—but siding, Grania thought, with Mother. “Jim,” Mamo said, “is a truly decent man.”

  Now Grania was to return home as if nothing had changed. But everything had changed. Grania had not lived at home—except during the summer months—since she was nine years old. Tress did not seem to mind moving back; she had never left town. In September, after Kenan left, she had given up their rented rooms and moved home. She was already installed in the old bedroom upstairs.

  The married sisters were not so independent now.

  Tress had made it clear to their parents that she intended to start looking for a house to rent at the first sign that the war would be over. Grania knew that Father would have her and Tress at home as long as they would stay. Despite spending most of his time in his office, or with his horses, or visiting Bompa Jack on the farm, he wanted his family around him. He wanted to know that his sons and
daughters were near. And the truth of Mamo’s arguments could not be disputed: it was wartime; people were leaving; the hotel needed help.

  No, the sisters were not so independent after all.

  Grania glanced up at her old bedroom window above the veranda, half expecting to see Tress’s face. Most of the leaves on the tree at the front were down. She looked at Jim, and watched his lips from the side as they passed. He was humming again, she could tell. He, too, wanted her to stay with her parents while he was away. She had left the school, left her work at the hospital and said her goodbyes.

  Right now, she didn’t want to think about any of this. But she had never been good at pushing things away.

  “What else?” she said. “About sound.” They were nearing the rocky place at the edge of the woods by the shore. She had never told him about her walks here with Mamo, when Mamo carried the O’Shaughnessy clock bag. She had never told anyone.

  He looked around and saw a plump bumblebee hovering against a fall blossom. The bee darted sideways in their direction and disappeared, a zigzag flight she followed with her eyes.

  “Bee,” he said. “The bumblebee is small and fat but makes a big sound.”

  “Like?” Mamo always said, “Sounds like…” and then explained.

  “Like an M.”

  Grania watched him form an awkward M with three fingers of his right hand.

  “Like an M pushed through paper wrapped around a comb,” he said. “When it comes out the other side, it turns to a buzz.”

  “I know about the buzz through the comb. Tress and I did that when we were children. The buzz felt like fur on my lips.”

  “You tell me something,” he said. “Something I’ve noticed.”

  She waited.

  “When we are with people, in your parents’ home, or Bompa Jack’s—or anywhere—if there is a noise inside the house, a loud thump or something that sends out vibrations, you never look in the direction of the noise. You look to someone’s face, instead—to see what’s happened, to find out what’s going on. You don’t look for the sound, you look for the information.”