But Grace knows how to use her voice. The others watch and know that she is the best speaker of them all. She arrived at school when she was eleven and tried to leave the same day she arrived. As
she wasn’t allowed to leave, she learned what she had to do, and this is the part of the story Grania likes best.
Grace taught herself to turn off sound. Listening with a tiny bit of hearing makes her so tired, she has taught herself, instead, to be deaf. She has learned to fall into her own silence—the place where Grania and the others live without choice. And Grace knows how to stay there. While she was learning to be deaf, she stuffed cotton down her ear canals and then braided her hair and pinned a circle of braid over each ear so the teachers wouldn’t see. She has tried everything she can think of to block the entry of sound.
Celia is a long-necked girl who pretends to be fearless, but Grania knows—as do the others in the dorm—that every morning at the same time, eleven-thirty, just before dinner, Celia walks into the girls’ washroom to have a cry behind the door. After three or four minutes, she wipes her eyes, comes out and catches up to her class in the dining hall, where she can be seen laughing and using the sign language with her friends. But first, she has to have her daily cry. It is Celia who complains to Grania that no one checks their dormitory at night. Miss O’Shaughnessy sleeps in her own room down the hall. “Everyone thinks we are sleeping, but we could be dead,” Celia says, flipping a palm to make the sign for dead.
But Grania is not worried about being dead. Grania is worried about the dark. She hates the dark. She keeps her eyes open as long as she can. She thinks of what Tress told her at home.
I tell my brain to stop thinking, and then I go to sleep.
She tries not to miss Tress. But she can’t help herself; she misses her every moment. She misses Tress telling her what is going on. She misses the language of the ankle rope and the gentle tugs that anchor her to her sister’s bed. Grania remembers her talk with Father and, from the unfamiliar mattress, she begins to list her fears aloud.
Don’t let me live here forever.
Don’t let them lock the big doors.
Don’t let me be an orphan.
Let me go home again.
Don’t let me live here forever.
Don’t let me be an orphan.
Let me go home again.
She chants to herself, her fingertips tapping the side of her leg as she throws her fears out into the dark. She inches her body down into the bed and even deeper into the place where her silence lies, the place where she is safe.
In the middle of winter, Fry—her real name Freda—is led to the dormitory. Pupil number 272, Fry attended school earlier in the United States and has now moved to Ontario with her parents, Canadians returning to Toronto, where they were born. During their trip back, they have dropped Fry off in Belleville, along the way. Fry, deaf from meningitis since age four, lost her hearing and her spoken language as well. She has had difficulty using her voice ever since. She was a good student at the American school and there is little she cannot communicate in the sign language. But her old school began to shift exclusively to the Oral Method, and it is for this reason that her parents have moved her back to Canada.
The house mother pushes and shoves and rearranges beds in the dorm and, for reasons of her own, assigns the tall girl to the now-empty bed beside Grania. When Grania walks into the room, Fry looks up and smiles. She has green eyes that stare into Grania’s, and straight-cut bangs. Her arms are covered with more freckles than Grania has ever seen on one person. A small round depression is visible in each cheek, whether she is smiling or not. There is a scent of lavender coming from the clothes she is wearing. She and Grania become instant friends.
Fry is able to use the language of hands more rapidly than anyone
Grania has ever seen, but she is self-conscious about her voice. “My voice is broken,” she tells Grania that first day when they sit on the edge of their beds and face each other. She makes the sign for break with her hands, and snaps the invisible voice that falls between them. “My voice is broken broken broken.”
“Tell me,” Grania’s hands say. Since Fry has moved to the dorm, Grania’s own sign language has improved. “What was it like when you lost your hearing?”
Fry replies in a beat as one hand bats the air over her shoulder. “Long time past. Five years now. I was sick—weeks in bed, not much remembering now. But I remember my heart pounding so hard I thought it would explode. First time I went outside, I felt my own footsteps walking through me. Like being trapped in a drum. I believed I was hearing. Maybe it was before the sickness. Maybe it was the last bit of hearing I had.” She looks away, then back. “What do you remember?”
“Sounds. I think there are sounds in my head.”
“Which sounds?” Fry leans forward.
“Doors closing.” The edges of Grania’s palms slam together, facing out. “Big doors. By the office, at the entrance. First day here, I heard them shut behind me.” She stops.
“You felt the doors,” says Fry. She makes a face. “The way we feel thunder.”
“No, I heard them.” Grania is insistent. “I heard the doors. Sometimes I dream about them banging.” She pauses. “I had a dream last night. Father brought me to his office to tell me I was going away—to a school where children’s ears do not hear. I was brought here, and then—my parents were outside the doors and I was in. I banged at the wood, and the house mother came.” She makes the
O
near her cheek, the name-sign for Miss O’Shaughnessy.
Grania recalls, in the dream, looking up to a row of teeth, a wrinkling of skin, a face not unkind, wreathed by greying hair. She also
remembers that in the dream, when Miss O’Shaughnessy’s mouth moved, she was babbling. She raised her index finger, the other three fingers joining the thumb. Her hand slid back from the side of her lips and made the tiniest bounce along the line of her jaw. The babbling continued, but Grania understood. It was her first formal word in the sign language—
dormitory.
The word that led her to the building where she slept her first night away from family and home.
“It’s the sad place,” says Fry. “The big doors. Where we all cry when our parents leave us.”
“I cried,” says Grania. “Every day for two weeks.” She hasn’t talked to anyone else about this. But now it is part of her history in the place. And she has a friend to tell.
On the third Wednesday of June at the end of her first year, after nine long months of school, Grania lifts the soft-sided bag with the wooden handles that Father has brought with him so that she can carry her own small things on the steamer. Father has already arranged for her trunk to follow them to Deseronto. Grania sniffs carbolic when she thinks of the trunk; her own and everyone else’s will be fumigated, clothes and all, when they return in the fall.
She isn’t going to think about the fall. She steps out through the big doors at the entrance. Today, a wedge of wood keeps each of the heavy panelled doors open so that people can come and go, in and out. Grania crosses the lawn two steps behind Father. When they reach the dusty road in front of the gates, she turns. The weather-vane on top of the roof, the steps, the buildings, all pull firmly together as if to say, “We’ll still be here in September.”
She turns her back.
From the road, the waves of the Bay of Quinte appear soft and grey. It is almost one o’clock in the afternoon. By four, every student will be gone, the little in care of the big, the big in care of teachers or supervisors who will deliver them to collecting points or appointed meeting places along the railway lines—west and east
and north and south. Since early morning, horse and rig, express wagon and flat-roofed taxi-buses with open sides have been hauling away trunks and luggage and every trace of the students and the school year. After final assembly, even motor cars have arrived at the main entrance to collect the few children who are to be driven home in private vehicles.
Grania and Fry hug each other and tears spill down Fry’s cheeks. Both girls know that when they return in September, Grania will be placed entirely with the Oral students, Fry with the Manual. No matter what, they vow, they will always be best friends.
Miss Amos is wearing a cheerful strawberry red necktie on the final day of school, and a jacket over her long-sleeved blouse. She is busy coralling a group of children in her care, but she looks up as Grania leaves and she waves. Several of the older students, the seniors, are putting on their serious faces. The moment they walk or are driven through the gates, or step onto a railway platform, or wait on a wharf—the moment they leave the school grounds—they know they are entering a world fraught with the unannounced and the sudden. They have to blend in, they have to look normal. They are about to rejoin the hearing world.
As Grania walks behind Father, the fingers of her free hand make
T
for Tress as she taps the letter against the side of her dress. She is travelling towards the sister she has not seen since the previous September. She wants to run, but Father walks steadily towards the dock and she catches up to him and keeps his pace. She glances at him sideways as the steamer approaches. His moustache needs a trim but she doesn’t care. She stays close to his side, and thinks of Grew the barber, and Main Street, and Father’s hotel, and the tower apartment, and Carlow, and her friends Orryn and Kenan, and the dugout. She thinks of her brothers, and Mother, and Mamo. She thinks of the journey ahead, the journey of just over two hours that will take the steamer to Northport for a brief stop and, finally, to the Deseronto wharf and home.
After laughing and being hugged by Mamo and Mother and Bernard, and Patrick who has grown so much, and after touching everything she can see to make sure it is all as she left it—rocker, woodbin, mantel, clock—and after sniffing Mamo’s Canada Bouquet, and after shouting a vowel at Carlow, after all of this, she and Tress run upstairs and shut the door to their room. The beds are in the same place, the rag rug between. The framed daffodils, the oval mirror, the sampler about God’s eye and ear hang from their hooks on the wall. The maple outside the window is in full leaf.
And now, the boundaries of their old private language explode as they begin to add in the new hand language that Grania has brought home. She teaches Tress with patience and expertise, positioning and repositioning her sister’s fingers, palms and thumbs.
This is the sign for girl
—she draws her thumb along her jawbone as if to tie a bonnet ribbon under her chin.
This is the sign for play
—she makes the
Y
sign and shakes out both hands. When the deaf boys’ team played hockey against the speaking boys in Belleville, her class was taken to a game.
This is the sign for race, for running.
She tells Tress about Victoria Day: how the children were taken for a picnic in a clearing in the woods by the bay. The senior girls gave a demonstration of fancy club swinging, and she was fascinated with the precision of the drill. She does not want to swing Indian clubs herself, but she might learn the scarf drill when she is older. Tress has never seen Indian club swinging or the scarf drill, and Grania stands on the rag rug and flings her arms about, trying to transfer the picture of tumbling clubs.
What Grania remembers most about the Victoria Day celebrations is that she wanted nothing more than to enjoy herself and to run races with Fry. They came second in the three-legged and first in the boot race, and won an orange each and two candies. At the end of the afternoon, she and Fry helped with the smaller children, getting them back to the dorms, walking slowly up the low incline. Miss Amos tried to keep up the spirits of the little ones in the younger classes, and led them in the signed chant:
The twenty-fourth of May,
The Queen’s birthday,
If we don’t get a holiday,
We’ll all run away.
That same evening, they ate prunes and bread and butter and milk for their supper, and later, after dark, they were taken outside again to watch a display of Roman candles, fire balloons and skyrockets, pin-wheels and fountain wheels. The night exploded silently before their eyes while, tired and excited, they leaned into each other’s warmth, their skirts tucked beneath them as they sat on the grass of the school lawns that were lighted all around with electric lights hidden inside Japanese lanterns. All of this, she tries to convey to Tress.
It is years later, after Grania learns to
own
the sign language by taking it inside herself—though the hearing teachers will eventually forbid its use while she struggles to please them with her voice—it is years later when she realizes how close to the visual-gestural language she and Tress actually were with the childhood signs they once invented for themselves.
Follow
, one thumb tracking the other;
want
and
eat
and
smile
and
water
and
fly
.
For her part, the first summer Grania comes home, Tress attempts to gather up and tell all of the remembered events that happened within house and hotel since Grania left. They communicate with excitement, Grania reading her sister’s lips as easily as she had before she left—the invisible air writing, too. Tress’s index finger writes C-o-r-a while she brings up the old complaints. Cora meddled in Aunt Maggie’s job at the library, and Aunt Maggie would not put up with it and gave Cora a piece of her mind. Grania tries to slow her sister’s story, tries to put the meaning of things together. A piece of mind, she quickly realizes—and makes the
adjustment to understanding—is an expression like kick the bucket, or apple of my eye.
The sisters pause and sink back on their beds. They realize almost at the same instant that it is impossible—the catching up. Too much has happened. Three seasons have passed. They will have to live inside short moments of the present, like travellers who shed parts of their lives, like the travelling ladies upon whom they used to spy across the roof. Like wisps of cloud that vanish inside a summer wind.