September Song (13 page)

A friend had recently called him, the overnight expert, to announce that he too had gone deaf. He gave him the name of his first doctor. Remembering his friend's happy outcome, he said now to this one, “Are you sure it's not just wax?”

The doctor gave him a pitying smile.

As with all incurable ailments, having it diagnosed made it worse.

That he could hear people speak but not understand what they said began by seeming as though he were in a country where the language was English, but in a mode foreign to him. He had experienced that in rural Ireland, in the Bahamas, in parts of the deep South. But knowing that what he was not understanding was what he had always understood before brought sometimes a sense that what was failing was not his ears but his mind.

He seized upon his new hearing aids as Jude the Obscure did upon the Greek and Latin grammars, expecting them to provide a key, a rule, a prescription which would enable him to change at will all words of the dead languages into those of his own. Jude was quickly disillusioned. “He learnt that there was no law of transmutation.”

The dead languages had played a shabby trick on Jude, and he wished that he had never seen a book, that he might never see another one, wished he had never been born.

Had he found the key he was seeking Jude would still not have known how the dead languages sounded. Nobody now knew that.

He was not quite so naive as Jude. The purchase contract warned not to expect these devices to restore normal hearing. Well, eyeglasses did not restore your vision but they kept you from having to grope your way. Crutches were better than a wheelchair, dentures preferable to the alternative. But to be disappointed when your expectations were low was bitterness compounded. That disclaimer was an understatement.

Sounds reached him as though up the shaft from the bottom of a well. His own voice was distanced. He became a stranger to himself.

His sick jokes sickened him. Pointing to his ears, he said, “I've got AIDS.” He said, “Now things can no longer go in one ear and out the other.” And since they unselectively picked up all sounds in a room, he would say to the person seated next to him, “Let me take these things out and maybe I can hear you.”

They were a nuisance. They fell out, got lost, consumed batteries. Ah, but when they began to fail him he felt marooned alone on a desert island watching his ship sail off without him into the infinite ocean.

The disclaimer accompanying the hearing aids warned also that they would not arrest the progress of the impairment.

His formula at first was a cheery “How's that?” or “Come again?” That sounded like what anybody might have said who had just missed a remark. As the silence thickened around him he said, “I'm sorry. Would you mind repeating?” Then like a bird limited to a single call, “What was that you said? What was that you said?” If others tired of hearing it they should know how tired of it he was! Finally, in discouragement, frustration, embarrassment, he gave up asking. Except of his poor long-suffering wife. He would have gone back to work so as to get himself out of the house but the only work he was fit for depended upon being able to hear. What kind of work did not?

He practiced lip-reading by watching television with the sound off. He was back with Jude again. He felt he had been sentenced to solitary confinement.

When in college he was first exposed to literature and decided he wanted to write, he set himself to memorizing the dictionary. He penciled the words he did not know. It was an absorbing assignment. He reveled in the richness of the language. He stuffed himself full as a fruitcake with long latinate words before realizing their uselessness and pruning his vocabulary. Now he was going through the dictionary again, this time crossing off the words he could no longer hear. In his second childhood he was unlearning to talk, going back to babble.

He knew now why in their portraits Beethoven and Goya looked so dour. Petrification of the ears gave to their faces an expression of stone. You could register no feeling when you did not know what was happening around you. Or much care, being no part of it. Music, laughter, words of wit, of love, the songs of birds, wind in the trees: all were lost on you.

“Go back off one noble size,” his wife said.

Go back off one noble size?

“How's that again?”

“GO BACK OFF ONE NOBLE SIZE.”

To foreigners, which was to say inferiors, who did not understand English you raised your voice and repeated yourself.

“Oh!”

He wondered then whether he ought not instead to have said “Oh?” The interrogative rather than the exclamatory might have brought an explanation.

Later he learned that Gorbachev had won the Nobel Prize.

He whose first love was English now resented it for its teasing of him, its elusiveness. He remembered taking revenge upon French when on his first visit to the country his made him feel inadequate and uncultivated and he had sung, “I'm dancing with larmes in my yeux because the fille in my bras isn't vous.”

Sometimes he thought he would go mad, and sometimes he thought he had. The unintelligible, almost intelligible babble in his head was maddening, was mad. He pressed his palms against his ears, creating a vacuum, then withdrew them sharply: a plumber's helper to unclog the drains. Unavailing. It would have been better, he thought in moments of obliquity, to be completely deaf, not tantalizingly half so, to have no memory of Mozart.

He had been a hunter, a bird hunter: grouse, woodcock. He loved watching the dogs range, loved the ripeness of the year, the comradeship. Now he no longer trusted himself to know at all times where his companion was. Out of sight of each other they hailed back and forth for safety's sake. He could not hear the dogs' bells, which meant he could not hear when they stopped tinkling as the dogs went on point. He could not hear a grouse take off when it was flushed—a sound to make a healthy man leap out of his skin.

He grew timid crossing streets, tires, motors, even horns being muffled, their distance from him uncertain. When driving he feared not hearing the shout of a child.

Well, but he could still write—that most solitary of occupations. He could were it not that in his sadness inspiration shunned him.

A kind friend gave him a book entitled
Adjustment to Adult Hearing Loss
. It was meant to comfort him. The consolation was in numbers. His wife read it.

“There are thirty million like you,” she said.

“How's that?”

“THERE ARE THIRTY MILLION LIKE YOU.”

“The dead are even more numerous,” he said. “But knowing that must be cold comfort when you join them.”

And if one more person said to him, “Well, it could be worse. You could be losing your eyesight,” he would choke him.

At times he disbelieved it. It was a mistake. Any minute now it would clear up, like after swimming: the water would come gushing hot from his ears and he would hear again as always before. Or like after the plane had touched down and was taxiing to the terminal: one more swallow and then would come that welcome “pop.”

Sometimes it seemed to him that he was just not listening attentively enough. He had almost understood what was said. If he just concentrated harder … Sometimes he persuaded himself that he
had
heard, only to learn that he had nodded in agreement when he ought instead to have shaken his head. Sometimes he felt he had not heard because he was so sure he was not going to.

All his waking hours now his head hummed with a trill like the treefrogs in spring, a sound he had always loved until it moved inside him. At other times the buzz was the same as static interference on the radio.
Tinnitus
that condition was called. Another label to have to bear.

Nature had made him deaf, he made himself dumb. As the world receded from him he wrapped himself still deeper in silence. Hungry as he was for company, he avoided people. Their pity made him both pity and despise himself. The frustration they could not help showing sometimes after being asked to repeat themselves and still not being understood embarrassed him. His very expression of entreaty and anxiety provoked his wife. “Don't look so pained!” she said. “Don't listen with your mouth open.” Then she regretted her impatience and was ashamed and he felt himself to blame for her self-reproach.

What should it matter that he could no longer follow the news on television? He could read it. But that was the very thing he could not do. The crackle of paper as the pages were turned, even the noise of a pack of cigarettes being ripped open, was excruciating, a sound like walking on sugar, amplified. If only he could hear other sounds as acutely as he heard those!

One dismal day his wife looked out a window and said, “Lots of cows up there.”

“How's that?”

“LOTS OF COWS UP THERE.”

“Where?”

“In the sky. Where else?”

“Cows in the sky?”

“CLOUDS! CLOUDS!” she shouted, and her shoulders sagged beneath the burden he had become.

As for him, he would have dashed himself against the rocks happily to have heard the sirens sing.

The Parishioner

H
ER PASTOR
,
REVEREND SMITH
, was being most supportive in Julia Johnson's bereavement. Her widowed mother's body was barely cold when he came to call. He came twice more before the burial. Julia was grateful, but after the third time she found herself rather hoping that he would not come again. Instead of better, his commiseration made her feel worse, instead of stronger, weaker. She was bearing up; he counseled her to break down. He encouraged her to let her tears flow, and he primed the pump. There was a time to mourn, he said.

Julia was sad but she was actually not quite so disconsolate as Reverend Smith told her she was, yet she could not very well disclaim it nor disappoint her comforter. For the truth was, she and her mother had not been every bit as close as he took for granted.

She must lean on him in her hour of need, being all alone, divorced, childless, with no brothers or sisters, said Reverend Smith. She had been trying not to think of that. Being reminded of it brought tears to her eyes.

When Reverend Smith said “lean on him” he meant it fully. The sight of her tears moved him to put his arms around his parishioner, lay her head on his shoulder, and pat her back paternally. He was by no means old enough to be her father, but he was taking the place of the one she did not have. She realized that her suffering had been deeper than she realized, wept freely, and felt elevated.

“You're very kind,” she said, accepting the offer of his handkerchief.

“My duty, my dear.”

At the funeral Reverend Smith eulogized the departed so fulsomely it made Julia appreciate her mother as never before, and reproach herself for not having done so. The pastor took as his text: “A virtuous woman who can find? For her price is above rubies. She spreadeth out her hand to the poor. She openeth her mouth with wisdom; And the law of kindness is on her tongue. Her children rise up, and call her blessed.” He cited the dead woman's many good works in the community, generally unknown, for virtue blushed to be discovered. He spoke of her humility, her patience, her compassion. He dwelt at length upon her devotion to her late husband, to her only child. When he finished there was scarcely a dry eye in the congregation. All felt they had had a saint unnoticed in their midst. Behind her veil Julia wept unrestrainedly. Only now did she know that she had had the best of mothers. For this belated recognition she had Reverend Smith to thank. The depth of the regret he stirred in her made her feel she was atoning at least a little for her past neglect.

At the graveside Reverend Smith suggested that the mourners gathered around the hole all join hands in silent prayer. As the coffin was lowered to rest he gave Julia's several encouraging squeezes.

It was after the funeral that Julia's grief really hit her, as Reverend Smith had foretold it would. He was in steady attendance upon her at this critical time. How well he understood a daughter's love for her mother, the pain of losing her! The gravity of his bearing inspired confidence in his wisdom. His aptness with scripture indicated experience. He carried with him a spiritual prescription pad. His remedies were not sugar-coated. No false cheer, no shallow solace did he offer. He nursed her grief along, let it run its course, applied his sympathy to the sore spot like poultices to bring a boil to a head. He called daily, like a doctor on his rounds, took her emotional temperature, pulse and pressure. He had a most comforting bedside manner.

At last came the day when Reverend Smith pronounced that there was a time to cease from mourning. It was as though after a long illness her doctor said it had peaked and she would now begin to recover. Of course, convalescence would be slow. She had had a bad bout and had been left weak, shaken and susceptible. He was there for her to lean upon.

In the first phase Reverend Smith's text had been: “Let tears fall down over the dead. Weep bitterly and make great moan.” Now from the same Biblical passage he drew this further bit: “Use lamentation, and that for a day or two, and then comfort thyself in thy heaviness. Thou shalt do the dead no good, but hurt thyself. When the dead is at rest, let remembrance rest.

“God's will be done.

“Amen.”

In gratitude to her pastor Julia volunteered for church duties. She collected castoff clothes from donors, baked for fundraising suppers, visited the sick. She laid away her black clothes; however, lest it seem that her recovery had been too rapid, she still sought Reverend Smith's guidance as before. She assured him that, with his help, she was better, but he seemed to have misgivings about that, as though a relapse was to be feared. It was strange but true that his encouragement had the contrary effect of discouraging her. He made her feel that she was a person of deeper feelings than she knew, and for this she was grateful to him, but it also rather scared her and this made her more than ever dependent upon his support.