Deafening

by Frances Itani

  Now in their twenties, Fry and Colin had known since their teens that their lives would be joined together. Not the way Tress and Kenan decided, at the age of ten, that they would marry when they were older. Not like that. It was knowledge that asserted itself during the last years they were students at the school. Everyone else knew, and did not question. Colin used to stand to the side at morning recess when the girls danced with one another—and his eyes never left Fry. He didn’t care that he was teased by his friends. Two by two, arms around waists, the girls danced. No music needed; there was only the swish of skirts, the scuffling shoes, the rhythm created out of silence. The group broke up suddenly when everyone had to line up for a slice of bread and a spoon of molasses. Grania shuddered when she thought of the thick syrup, how she had choked when she’d tried to make it slide down her throat.

  In the afternoons, the girls went back to class to learn sewing while the boys went to the print shop or the shoe shop, or to carpentry. Most afternoons, the girls did fancy work, learning and perfecting stitches. It was difficult to come out of the Belleville school and not sew like an expert. Other days, they mended.

  Miss Wyse, the sewing teacher, would reach into the basket of clothes that had been set in the centre of the room, sewing machines along one side, a bolt of cloth spread down the long table nearest the door. Light streamed in from the peaked windows. But there was no fancy stitching on mending day. Once a month the girls mended the boys’ clothes, which usually meant patching trousers. Each girl picked up a needle and thread and went to the circle of chairs. Miss Wyse distributed the trousers, a pair to each.

  “Why can’t the boys sew their own patches?” Fry had signed to Grania.

  Miss Wyse signalled her to work. No talking, no signs.

  But when the teacher left the room for a few moments, the girls checked the names in the waistbands, jumped up from their chairs, and swapped. Grania was handed Edgar’s trousers and shook her head, No. Edgar was a boy who tried to trip the girls on the rink during carnival. Edgar was foolish. She settled, instead, for Charlie’s. When Colin’s trousers were identified, they were quickly passed around the circle. Fry always sewed the patches on Colin’s clothes. No one ever disputed her right to mend for Colin.

  Now, not so many years later, Colin was doing everything he could to leave Fry and go away to war.

  Was it selfish to want the men to stay home? They were sent into danger. Many were killed. It was someone else’s war.

  Grania knew what Jim would say: This is our war, too. We are needed.

  One evening, when he’d been singing in Aunt Maggie’s kitchen in the tower apartment, she asked what the song was and he told her, “Dear Hame hid awa’ in the Glen.” He wrote out the title for her; he had learned the words that week. While they put away the dishes after supper, she teased him about singing to the plates and pots and pans. She saw now that every moment they’d shared during the two weeks in the tower had been part of an elaborate farewell. They had shut everything and everyone else out. It was only later, after Jim left, that she understood the true intensity of their time together.

  He had leaned over the backs of soldiers at the open window of the train. He had made her name-sign with his hand. She carried the picture in her memory—Jim reaching across his tunic, the coach with the chalked number 5. There were no yellow-rope letters in this picture. Only her husband, searching for her in the crowd.

  Now, the same trains that had crossed the country from west to east, collecting cheering boys who kept time to thrilling vibrations of marching bands, were crossing the country in the opposite direction. Pulling the same cars, half-empty, from one coast to the other. Puffs of steam rose into the air and vanished while the walking wounded helped offload the limbless and disabled. Some days, after a train passed through, the platforms in the towns were strewn with an unaligned jumble of vacant, staring, young-old men. Grania had seen them in Deseronto and in Belleville and in Napanee.

  Jim had left Canada excitedly, heading for the country of the King, His Most Excellent Majesty of the British Dominions beyond the seas and Defender of the Faith. She thought of the children at school when Cedric had raised his ruler like a baton at the front of the crowded Assembly Room, and taught the motto of the Empire Day Movement. One King, One Flag, One Fleet, One Empire. The children’s hands had shaped the signs of loyalty, their earnest young bodies standing smartly to attention. She had been one of those children. And so had Colin. And so had Fry.

  Grania folded Fry’s letter and slipped it into her pocket. She glanced up to see Bernard crossing the lobby. He smiled but did not stop to speak. She thought of Fry and Colin again, and was not surprised that they were both discouraged. Colin had been accused of cowardice. Grania felt her own anger rise on his behalf, but she knew there was nothing she could do. Nothing the three of them could do except continue to try to take charge of their lives.

  It had been Miss Marks who had helped the students understand the concept of taking charge, and Grania thought of her now. “You will have to ignore some things outside of yourselves,” she’d told them. “But try to be in charge of your own information. If you rely on others to tell you what is going on, then others will be in charge of your life. Some things you can act on, some things you cannot. Try not to be frustrated while you learn what you can do.”

  Grania hoped that Colin remembered the discussions. He wanted badly to do his bit in the war but that was not going to be allowed. It would take courage to ignore the insults of people who did not know half as much about conducting themselves with dignity as Colin did.

  Chapter 10

  We left the station and went to a hotel, where we boarded, until Monday. A soldier introduced his mama to my mama, so my mama was not lonesome. The soldier was lame and his right arm was almost dead, but he was cheerful. It all happened one day when they were marching at Camp Borden. Some girls threw cigarettes to them and they all wished to get one, and our friend fell and his comrades fell on top of him. He has two brothers in khaki. One has been returned home crazy, and the other came home at the same time as my dad.

  The Canadian

  In the late afternoon, on her way home from the store, Grania stopped off at the post office. She reached into the box and there, in her hand, was the first item of mail sent to her from France. Proof that Jim was at the war, in the war, a part of the war. She tried to take in the information at a single glance: the right-slanted handwriting, the texture, the date, April 8, 1916. She thought of Jim’s long fingers, his gentle hands, one holding the card, the other holding the pencil. She raised the card to her nose but could detect nothing more than the scent of handled paper, of use.

  What she held in her hand was a Field Service Postcard, pale and brownish coloured, with pencil lines drawn through print. Apart from the date and a dark amoeba-like smudge beside the year, the only handwritten word on the entire card was a name. He had signed at the bottom, Chim.

  She stepped back and took a breath and steadied herself against the wall. Why did the card seem more of a threat than a greeting? Jim had held it in his hands. It meant that he was alive—on the eighth of April. Of course he was alive; if he were not, she’d have received a telegram. But now it was the third of June. There must have been delays all along the way; this had taken longer to arrive than his earlier letters from England. She gripped it tightly with both hands and read the lines printed on the card.

  Nothing is to be written on this side except the date and signature of the sender. If anything else is added the post card will be destroyed.

  Jim had obeyed instructions and had drawn a line through every sentence on the face of the card except I am quite well. Lines had been drawn through:

  I have been admitted into hospital

  sick

  wounded

  and am going on well.

  and hope to be discharged soon.

  I am being sent down to the base.

  I have received your

  letter dated _
______________

  telegram dated _______________

  parcel dated _______________

  Letter follows at first opportunity.

  I have received no letter from you

  lately

  for a long time.

  Grania now saw that one other word was bare and exposed. This was at the bottom of the card and the word was lately. Somehow lately seemed more personal than I am quite well at the top. But because she had sent a number of letters, she had no way of knowing which had been received and which had not. At the time of writing the card, Jim indicated only that he’d received no letter lately.

  They had planned to number their letters after his departure, but she had given up on that hopeless system almost immediately. Letters took four weeks, or five, or six—the card had taken almost two months—and it was her belief that anything received at all was entirely by chance. She’d received short letters from Jim telling her that he was safe, that he was learning new things in his training, that the boys wanted to get on with the show and get to France. Sometimes he wrote to her about sound. Or he mentioned his new friend, who turned out to be from a farm not far from Bompa Jack’s. From the time Jim had joined the Field Ambulance, he had something to say about his friend Irish.

  She looked at the card and again she read I am quite well and lately, as if these words represented all that was unsaid between them. She rubbed her finger over the smudge at the top. Maybe it contained a truly private message. She smoothed the corners of the card and slipped it carefully into her handbag and went back out to the street.

  She knew she could not return home immediately. She saw Grew on one side of the street, and Cora on the other, heading towards her. She ducked around the side of the post office and went in, taking the stairs past the landing and the offices on second floor. She did not, at this or any other moment, want to be told one more time by Cora that she had a sweet little voice. She continued up the stairs, inhaling the scent of oak, aware of the late-spring air, aware of the pulse of her own echo as she followed the curvature of the banister. Her palm brushed against the richly stained wood, her fingers tracing the ridge of pattern as she climbed. When she reached the top, she was not disappointed to find that Aunt Maggie and Uncle Am were out. Quietly, she let herself in.

  It was the first time she had been alone in the tower apartment since the day after Jim’s departure, when she came to collect her things before she moved home. That same evening, Aunt Maggie and Uncle Am had returned across Lake Ontario from their trip to Oswego.

  She glanced left, then right, left, right. Each room opened off the wide main hall. She hung her coat on a hook and walked to the end of the apartment and began to inspect each room as if she were a visiting stranger, someone returning to a place she had known long ago in an intimate, remembered life.

  Here is the kitchen, the long room at the end on the left. This is where Aunt Maggie cooks. And where Jim had flipped French toast to perfection in the cast-iron pan, his lips singing as he presented it to Grania for her breakfast. Across the hall, this is the place one dines. But she and Jim had never dined here; they had eaten their meals picnic-style in front of the windows of the parlour so they could look out over the bay, setting the trays of food on the carpet between them.

  Walk backward now; these are the chambers for sleep. But not where she and Jim had made their bed.

  Turn right and enter the parlour. How elegant this room, so seldom used by Aunt Maggie and Uncle Am. The room chosen by Grania and Jim—she glanced at the carpet—the place where they unfolded the blue blanket and placed the pillows on top, and two blankets on top of those. The place of sleep. The place of love.

  She shut the hall door behind her. Against the back wall of the parlour, a small square window looked down over the inside stairs she had just climbed. The outer windows, the ones that faced the street, stretched up from the baseboard and lined the front of the room. She walked to these and looked over Main Street and the southern edge of town. The tower apartment was the only building on the street to command a view from this height. Even so, she felt the urge to be higher. In the back corner of the room, ladder rungs had been built into the wall in direct vertical ascent to the tower. Mindful of her skirt, she climbed, rung by rung, remembering a day she had come up here with Jim. When she reached the trap door, she pushed it open and latched it back, and stepped up and over to the platform at the top.

  As children, she and Tress had been permitted to climb the ladder inside the tower, but only when Uncle Am was behind, ready to catch them if they slipped. He had lifted them, each in turn, to the south face of the clock, the peering-out place, so that they could see past the Rathbun industries along the water’s edge and over the arms of the Bay of Quinte beyond. Each time she had looked out, Grania had imagined herself in the lighthouse that blinked from the page of her Sunday book. The C-shore page. Dan caught the child in his arms. While one part of her never accepted the girl’s passive sinking through the waves in the picture, another part of her had. Under was the calm beneath the surface. Above the surface, mixed-up things could happen, and did.

  Now Grania stood inside the four faces of the clock and thought under, and beneath, and behind. She tried to think of places where, for the hearing world, all would be still and silent. Not here, inside a clock.

  The only person who climbed the tower these days was Uncle Am. It was his job to oil the gears and wheels, to wipe a thick cloth across the iron structure, to rotate the long jutting rods that attached horizontally to the centre of each clock face so that the outside hands could be corrected. Jim had been up here to oil the clock during Uncle Am’s absence. When Grania had climbed up with him, she had shown him the peering-out place. Grew had been up here, too, almost two years ago. His son had left on the steamer to report to the barracks in Belleville, and Grew had raced up the stairs to the apartment and asked Uncle Am for permission to climb the tower so he could watch the steamer—and his boy—sail westward down the bay.

  She imagined Grew’s long legs climbing the ladder, perhaps touching down on every second rung. She thought of how he had stayed in the tower long after the steamer was no more than a speck in the distance. “He stood,” Aunt Maggie had said, shaking her head, “even when there was nothing to see but water and sky.”

  Grania understood why Grew had stayed up here to stare at the horizon. Just as she understood why the few remaining people on the platform of the Belleville station stayed, long after the troop train departed. Jim had been on that train and she’d been among those few. The ones who lingered stared into the vanishing point that had swallowed the train. When, finally, she had turned away, it was to turn towards a change in her life.

  Jim had gone to war.

  She had walked away from the station looking straight ahead, not wanting to see the face of anyone she knew, not wanting to speak or communicate. She did not cry; she never cried. Her feet had kept her moving.

  Later that afternoon, she made her way through familiar streets and climbed the outside stairs to the apartment that Fry and Colin were renting in the small house not far from the school. She could not have told anyone where she had been during the intervening hours; to this day she did not know where she had wandered. Fry was home, and when she saw Grania, she did not ask questions. She pulled her in and hugged her tight and headed for the kitchen to put on a pot of tea. If Grania wanted to be alone, Fry would not be offended. If she wanted to stay over, she could sleep on the sofa. There was little extra room, but she was welcome.

  But Grania had not wanted to be by herself. She sat in the kitchen and watched while Fry signed the news of their friends at school. Grania did not smile or pretend to be happy. When Colin came home after work he, too, understood. She was content to sit at the supper table and watch him communicate the things that had gone on in the print shop that day. On his way home, he told them, he’d passed two soldiers on outpost duty on the road in front of the school. They had been placed there so that none of th
e troops in Belleville went out of bounds without permission. Colin had saluted as he’d passed.

  Grania had watched the conversation, but had felt no need to nod or join in. What was most dear to her was being held in a tight place high in her chest. She felt as if she would be forced to take shallow breaths for days and weeks and months, until Jim would come home. She remembered Mamo helping her to keep her voice close; she remembered how she’d been trained at school to hold her words before letting them out. But this was different. Something else—not words—was locked inside her. Locked inside that tight closed place.

  She reached out a hand now and touched the side of the huge tower bell. It was taller than her own height, and suspended over air. A massive, rigid clapper, attached to the workings of the clock, was perched above the outer rim of the bell and ready to strike. In Aunt Maggie’s parlour below, a tall mahogany cupboard cleverly disguised the clock’s long pendulum cables that stretched down through the tower and were suspended over a deep bed of sand. When Grania had first entered the parlour and walked past the floor-to-ceiling panels of the cupboard, she had not remembered the three-foot depth of sand at the bottom. “If the cables ever come crashing down…” Uncle Am once said, but he didn’t finish the sentence. The mahogany cupboard had been built upward from below, through the ceiling and into the tower. No one ever suspected that cables were suspended inside.