Deafening (11 page)

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

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.

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.