Deafening Read online

  Deafening

  Frances Itani

  For my son, Russell Satoshi Itani.

  And for my remarkable Grandmother Gertrude (Freeman) Stoliker (1898–1987).

  And for the nine and a half million who died serving their countries 1914–1919.

  The Artificial Method is a system founded by one Heinicke, a Saxon, who pursued successfully the occupations of farmer, soldier, schoolmaster, and chanter…This system aims at developing, by unnatural processes, the power of speech, and the educating of the ear. It takes a much longer time to educate the pupils by this system than by other methods, and more painful efforts on the part of the pupil. Indeed in many cases it is so painful to the poor deaf-mute as to cause blood to issue from the mouth.

  Canadian Illustrated News, August 1, 1874

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Magic Lantern Views:

  Prologue

  I 1903–1905

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  II 1915

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  III 1916

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  IIII 1917-1918

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  V 1919

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  P.S.

  About the author

  Author Biography

  About the book

  In Her Own Words: An Interview with Frances Itani

  Background Notes to Deafening

  Read on

  Recommended by Frances Itani

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Praise for Deafening

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Magic Lantern Views:

  At first I saw the picture of Hon. R. L. Borden and our teacher told us that he is the Premier of Canada. The next picture I saw was King Albert I of Belgium. Then another one was King George V. He looks like the Czar of Russia. I saw the pictures of some German buildings. One of them was a Cathedral on which the English soldiers had dropped bombs. They did right, as many Germans dropped bombs in England. They were doing just the same, and not unjustly. I saw Germans riding in carriages through Belgium. They were boastful as they did not ask the people’s permission. Many soldiers marched on the road.

  Gertie Freeman

  The Canadian, May 1, 1915

  Belleville, The Ontario School for the Deaf

  Prologue

  1902

  “Your name,” Mamo says. “This is the important word. If you can say your name, you can tell the world who you are.”

  “Graw…”

  “Sounds like claw. Like the claw on the cat that prowls at the back. The one your father won’t allow in the hotel—or in the house either, for that matter.”

  Grania has been watching closely but she’s not certain what her grandmother has just said.

  “Claw,” Mamo says again. “Watch my throat, watch my lips.”

  “Claw.”

  Mamo nods. “Good. I believe this is coming from your memory. ‘Graw’ is the part that means love. Now, say Graw-nee-ya.” Mamo bares her teeth. Her lips shape the child’s name in separate parts. The way Grania sections an orange and puts the segments back together again to make the orange whole.

  “Graw-nee-ya.” Grania bares her teeth and Mamo laughs.

  “Is that what I look like? Don’t try so hard. Say it easily. Grawnya. Over and over. Clearly and well.”

  But her older brother, Bernard, calls her Grainy. Has done since the week she was born, and won’t stop now just because the scarlet fever she had last winter made her deaf. Bernard’s lips smile when he says the end of her name.

  With her sister, Tress, it’s different again. When Tress calls her Graw, her jaw drops. Tress and Grania have already begun to make up their own language, with their hands.

  Mother’s lips make a straight line. She does not smile or laugh when she says that Grania must pay attention every second, every minute. If she doesn’t, people will think she’s stupid. She has to be ready all the time.

  Ready? For what?

  To break through the silence.

  But the silence also protects. Grania knows. Being inside the silence is like being under water. Only when she wants to surface, only then does she come to the top.

  Mamo calls the family together: Mother, Father, Bernard, Tress, even Patrick, who has only recently begun to speak himself.

  “Don’t treat her differently,” Mamo tells them. “Talk to her the way you did before she was sick. Include her in everything. Don’t leave her out. She may be only five years old but never stop speaking to her, whether she understands or not. Encourage her to talk back. In a month, she’ll be six and she is going to need schooling.”

  Mother has not made up her mind about schooling. Twice a week, she goes to the Catholic church and prays that Grania’s hearing will come back. Even though the priest shakes his head, Mother has not given up hope.

  Father looks at his third child, his red-haired daughter, her brows scrunched, eyes intent, her glance flitting from one pair of lips to another. Father tries to keep his sorrow at bay. He knows that the child will never hear. Dr. Clark’s diagnosis has been emphatically clear.

  Patrick, the baby, walks from one pair of knees to another, balancing as he goes. “Talk,” he says, imitating Mamo. “Talk, talk.”

  I

  1903–1905

  Chapter 1

  A deaf child will learn 300 to 500 words in a year if at all intelligent. First, the child is taught the sounds and then how to combine them.

  Lecture, The Toronto Fair

  Deseronto, Ontario

  “Go to my room.” Mamo is pointing to the floor above. “Bring the package on my bureau.”

  Grania watches her grandmother’s lips. She understands, pushes aside the heavy tapestry curtain that keeps the draught from blowing up the stairs, and runs up to the landing. She pauses long enough to glance through the only window in the house that is shaped like a porthole, even though it’s at the back of the house and looks over land, not water. She peers down into the backyard, sees the leaning fence, the paddock and, over to the right, the drive sheds behind Father’s hotel. Far to the left, over the top of the houses on Mill Street, she can see a rectangle of field that stretches in the opposite direction, towards the western edge of town. A forked tree casts a long double shadow that has begun its corner-to-corner afternoon slide across the field. Remembering her errand, Grania pulls back, runs to Mamo’s room, finds the package tied up in a square of blue cloth and carries it, wrapped, to the parlour. Mamo pulls a low chair over beside her rocker. Her rocker moves with her, out to the veranda, back to the parlour, out to the veranda again.

  “Sit here,” her lips say.

  Grania watches. Her fingers have already probed the package on the way down the stairs, and she knows it is a book. At a nod from Mamo she unties the knot and folds back the cloth. The first thing she sees on the cover is a word, a word picture. The word is made of yellow rope and twines its way across the deck of a ship where a bearded captain steers and a barefoot boy sits on a rough bench beside him. The boy is reading a book that is identical to the one in Grania’s hands—it
has the same cover. The sea and sky and sails in the background are soft blues and creams and browns.

  Grania knows the rope letters because, after the scarlet fever, she relearned the alphabet with Mamo. The yellow letters curve and twist in a six-letter shape.

  “Sunday,” Mamo says. “The title of the book is Sunday, but you may keep the book in your room and look at it any time you want. Every day, we will choose a page and you will learn the words under the picture. Yes?” Eyebrows up. A question.

  The book is for her. This she understands. Yes. Her fingers roam the cover but she has to be still or she will give Mamo the fidgets.

  “There are many words in the book,” Mamo says. “So many words.” She taps her fingertips against the cover. “Some day, you will know them all.” She mutters to herself, “If you can say a word, you can use it,” not knowing how much Grania has understood. “We will do this, word by word—until your parents make up their minds to do something about your schooling. You’ve already lost one year, and a valuable part of another.”

  Mamo’s finger points at the book and her eyes give the go-ahead flicker. Grania opens the stiff cover and turns the blank sheet that follows. The word Sunday is on the inside, too, but this time its letters are dark and made of twigs instead of yellow rope. The page that follows the twigs is in colour.

  A brown-and-white calf has stopped on a grassy path and is staring at a girl. The girl is approaching from the opposite direction. She seems to be the same size and age as Grania; she might be seven or eight. Only the back of her can be seen—blue dress, black stockings, black shoes. Her hat, daisies tumbling from the crown, droops from one hand. A doll wearing a red dress dangles limply from the other. The doll’s hair is as red as Grania’s. No one in the picture is moving. The calf looks too startled to lift a hoof.

  Grania points to two words beneath the picture and looks at Mamo’s mouth.

  “‘BOTH AFRAID,’” Mamo reads.

  The first sound erupts from Grania’s lips. “BO,” she says. “BO.”

  Mamo makes the TH shape with her tongue. “BO-TH.”

  Grania tries over and over, watching Mamo’s lips. TH is not so easy. She already knows AFR AID. Afraid is what she is every night in the dark.

  “Practise,” Mamo tells her. She lifts herself out of the rocker, leaving behind the scent of Canada Bouquet, the perfume she chose because of its name and because she chose this country and because of the stench of the ship she left behind many years ago, and because Mr. Eaton sends the perfume from his mail-order catalogue in tiny bottles that cost forty-one cents. The air flutters like a rag as she walks away.

  Grania breathes deeply, inhaling the scent. She sniffs the closed book and squeezes it to her as if it might get away. Both and afraid roll together, thick and half-new on her tongue. She runs upstairs to the room she shares with her older sister. Tress is stretched out reading her own book, The Faeries. Sometimes, Mamo and Tress read aloud to each other, after Tress walks home from school. Grania watches their lips, but she doesn’t know the stories.

  “Say,” Grania says to Tress. She points to the words beneath the picture. “Say in my ear.”

  Tress’s glance takes in the new book. She knows it is a gift from Mamo. “What’s the use?” she says. “You won’t hear.” She shakes her head, No.

  “Shout,” says Grania.

  “You still won’t hear.”

  “Shout in my ear.” She narrows her voice so that Tress will understand that she is not going to go away. She turns her head to the side and feels Tress’s cupped hands and two explosive puffs of air.

  Tress listens as Grania practises, “BOTHAFRAID BOTH-AFRAID BOTHAFRAID.”

  “Pretty good,” her mouth says. She shrugs and goes back to The Faeries.

  Supper, like all meals, is eaten at the big oval table—the family-only table—in the private corner of the hotel dining room, next door. All through the meal Grania thinks of the brown-and-white calf and the girl in the blue dress. She sees them in her head when she walks along Main Street with Mamo in the early evening, and when she lies in her bed later, eyes open in the dark.

  “Bothafraid,” her voice says softly. She doesn’t want Tress, across the room, to hear. A breeze wisps through the window sash above her sister’s bed.

  Tress’s window faces the slope of roof that tilts towards the upper balcony of the hotel. From up here, house and hotel appear to be joined, though they are not; there is a roofed, open passageway between. A second bedroom window looks over Main Street and the Bay of Quinte, a large bay that slips in from the great Lake Ontario, which is part of the border between Canada and United States. A single maple tree grows up past this front window of the girls’ room.

  Almost every family activity takes place on the short stretch of road that is the Main Street of town. To the east, not far past Naylor’s Theatre, Main Street ends where land meets bay. The western end of Main, where Grania lives, tips up to join the old York Road, now Dundas Street, which leads west through Mohawk Indian lands and on to the city of Belleville, twenty miles farther along the bay. To the east, the same road passes through the northern part of town and leads to Napanee, Kingston and the St. Lawrence River. Much of the town of Deseronto lies below this road, on the edge of the bay.

  The town is like an overgrown village, really, but the Rathbun industries have been here for years and have made it a company town that boasts a railway, and steamers, and numerous enterprises sprawled along the waterfront. Many of the factories and stacks of lumber, the mill, the coal sheds, the railway-car shops, the tracks and the turntable for the engines lie between Main Street and the shore. On both sides of Main there is a mixture of houses and places of business: telegraph office, confectioner, baker, grocer around the corner, Chinese laundry with steam-covered windows, gentlemen’s tailor, general store, Tribune printing office, post office with its high clock tower, barber on the other side of the street, Naylor’s Theatre towards the end, harness shop, fire hall and hardware. On the back streets are the undertaker, more grocers and bakeries, police and library in one building—library is where Aunt Maggie works—community halls and churches, and the billiard hall. Mamo names the buildings when she walks with Grania through the town, but Grania knows that she is permitted to visit only grocer, butcher and post office when she is on her own.

  Father’s hotel is always busy because it is on the corner of Mill Street and Main, directly across from the railway station and the wharf, where the steamers dock.

  In the girls’ upstairs room in the house beside the hotel, there is no window over Grania’s bed. Her side is wall. Wall on the right, windows front and left. She has learned right and left from Mamo. She thinks of the Sunday book and the new words beneath the picture. Neither calf nor girl will ever move towards each other. They will be waiting for her when she wakes in the morning and opens the cover. She will stare at them and there they will be, face to face, looking at each other on the page.

  “You’re smart,” Mamo tells her. They are on the veranda and Mamo has brought the rocker outside. Mamo is relentless. She articulates firmly and carefully into the air, and Grania is expected to keep up. “You could read lips before you were deaf. When your parents wanted to talk—grownup talk—they had to turn their backs to whisper because you were so nosy. Do what you’ve always done. Before you were sick. You’re the one in the family who sees.”

  Grania watches Mamo point to her own eyes. “Since you were a tiny baby, you’ve seen what’s around you. As soon as you could raise your head, you peered up over the side of your cradle.” She laughs, thinking of this.

  Grania knows when Mamo is talking about baby times. She can tell from the softening in Mamo’s face.

  “Did I have thick sense?”

  “Thick what?”

  “When I was a baby. Aunt Maggie says I have thick sense. I know what she will do before she knows.”

  Mamo smiles. When she smiles there is an up-and-down line between her eyebrows. “I see.�
�� She holds her arms open, and Grania walks into them and waits while Mamo smacks a kiss onto her forehead.

  Mamo turns sideways from the waist and draws a six in the air with her index finger. Grania watches the number assume its invisible shape.

  “Six. Six-TH sense, not thick. If you have it, you shouldn’t be talking about it.”

  Now Mamo’s pointing finger makes a circle. “I’m going to turn you around—keep your eyes open, wide open. When you stop, tell me what you see. Understand?”

  A game. Grania understands. She feels Mamo’s hands on her shoulders and allows herself to be turned. Once. Twice. When she stops she is facing the end of her own veranda, looking between the pillars that support the hotel balcony, a dozen feet away.

  She turns back to Mamo.

  “Now look at me,” Mamo says. “Use voice, no hand signals. Keep the language you already have. What do you see?”

  “Wood post.” This comes out high.

  “Bring your voice down.” Mamo lowers her palm through the air. She’s using hand signals. “Colour?”

  “White. Uncle Am and boys painted.” Two of her cousins had come to town from a farm near Bompa Jack’s, to help paint. That night, they were allowed to sleep in an upstairs room of Father’s hotel.

  “The boys painted.”

  “Not Bernard. He worked in dining room on paint day.”

  “What else?”

  “Man.”

  “A man. Who?”

  “Mr. Conlin. Beside telegraph office.” She has also seen the Telegraph sign nailed between two poles, but she doesn’t mention this.

  “Wearing?”

  Grania shrugs.

  “Look again.”

  One more look. She tries to focus, remember. Turns back.

  “Funny hat. He wears the hat inside the post office where he works.”