Deafening (15 page)

He’d fallen silent because there she was, standing like a small contained island in the middle of the room. Perhaps a gathering
moment before she organized the tasks that would move her forward in several directions at once. Despite this being a hospital, he could hear a cacophony of activity from children in the ward upstairs. He had taken three stone steps down and through the shaded passageway, and now he felt the brightness of artificial light in the open room. He had come in at the side, the delivery entrance, where the bricks were coated with a thick display of vines. He thought of the thickness of the vines. He thought,
She hasn’t moved, why hasn’t she moved?
But he was the one standing there with packages stacked to his chin.

The vine leaves were darkening outside. He wanted to tell her. He wanted to say something about the lime green streaks through the leaves; how they twined—perhaps they’d been cut back intentionally to frame the windows upstairs. But she would know this. She worked here; she would think he was not in his right mind.

The hospital, Gibson Hospital, initially intended as a place to isolate children with infectious diseases, was divided by a hall down the middle, on the first and second floors. Jim guessed that upstairs, beds were assigned to boys on one side, girls on the other. A balcony on each level stretched across the front of the building and the effect of the whole was that of a large and elegant two-storey house. As for the young woman with the smock over her calf-length skirt and her back to him and her bright red hair swept up and pinned—he had never seen her before.

He walked forward and set the packages sent by Dr. Whalen on the shining surface of the countertop. Miss MacKay, the nurse on duty, entered the room from a short corridor, having come down a set of stairs herself. What was surprising when she spoke to him was that the young woman with the red hair—she was facing Miss MacKay—still had not moved. He walked behind her and his arms—as they reached over the counter—flickered, or so he imagined, into her peripheral vision. She showed no sign of being startled. She pulled a list from her pocket, looked it over, and tucked it into her pocket again.

She was deaf. Too late, he was sorry he had approached from behind. Any hearing person would have jumped a foot if he’d moved in from behind like that. No, a hearing person would have been aware of the noise made by his feet, would have been aware of the sound of him running down the steps of the passageway.

He hadn’t intended to startle. But she wasn’t startled.

“This is Grania,” Miss MacKay said, introducing. “Grania O’Neill. She’s been working with us for several years, ever since she graduated. She did the Home Nursing course when she was a student, and then she stayed on. We’re short-handed these days, we always are. It’s been worse since one of our nurses joined up—people at the school seem to be leaving every day.”

Grania watched Miss MacKay’s lips and Jim watched Grania—a visual triangle. Miss MacKay was explaining. “He helps Dr. Whalen; he works for him. He moved here from the east, from Prince Edward Island, and now he stays in Belleville.”

“Jim Lloyd,” he said, and held out his hand. He watched Miss MacKay’s fingers spell his names into the air, a quick but emphatic pause between the two.

Grania’s eyes were on the nurse’s right hand, not on Jim’s face—or only fleetingly. She looked at him directly then, and returned the greeting.
Her voice. A lilt of song.

“How do you do.” A small soft hand in his. She saw a speaking man, a lean young man with dark brown hair and dark eyes whose arms hung down as if they were loose in their sockets. He had long slender fingers, and he was taller than she, and he had an earnest face. She saw
earnest
in his eyes.

What Jim saw in Grania’s face was strength. A strength so still, it was possible she did not know it was there. Her skin was pale and clear, her eyebrows furrowed slightly, giving her face a quizzical expression, as if she were figuring things out. Her eyes were brown, and when he looked at her he felt that she knew something, perhaps something peaceful, or wise, that no one else could possibly know.

Miss MacKay continued. “We’ve had a card and a letter from our
nurse in England. During the crossing no one was allowed to take off their clothes or their boots at night. They had to be ready to get into the small boats quickly in case they were torpedoed by a submarine!” She was breathless using the words
torpedoed
and
submarine
, as if these were threats that were spoken of every day.

Jim turned back to Grania.

But Grania was gone. She had disappeared up the back stairs. He heard light footsteps, a pause at the top. And then, the sound of her was lost in the general inside and outside noise of the place.

Chapter 6

The son of one of our employees, who is at the Front with the first Canadian Contingent, was at the now famous battle of Langemarck where the Canadians so distinguished themselves. He had a very narrow escape when a German bullet, whizzing past his head, cut the lobe of his ear. He dropped to the ground and a Captain fell dead on top of him. Later in the battle, while assisting to move one of the big guns, he had his foot crushed by one of the wheels and is now in a hospital where he is doing well and hopes soon to be “at it” again.

The Canadian

Grania had been dreaming, same old dream. She sat on the edge of her bed and pushed back her long hair. She reached for and expertly slid two curved combs along the sides to hold the hair in place. She pulled up the counterpane and slipped into her dressing gown, and in her rush past the mirror detected movement from the bed on the other side of the room. Fry rolled over and opened one green eye and then the other, and she made a face. One pale arm, blotted with freckles, was outside the covers. She had been rubbing half-lemons on her arms since Grania had first known her, insisting that this diminished the number of freckles, but Grania had never noticed a bit of difference in all the years they’d shared a room.

They were in the new residence now; they had moved a year ago, just before the June visit of the Duke and Duchess of Connaught,
their daughter the Princess Patricia, and their entourage. The royal party had arrived in a grand automobile that glided onto the school grounds while the younger children, lining the edges of the walk, waved their small Union Jacks. Grania had taken a photo with her box camera that sunny day but it had come out disappointingly blurred, the faces no more than featureless smudges. All that could be seen were the large-brimmed hats and long dresses of the Duchess and the Princess Patricia, and their closed parasols pointing to the boards of the outdoor platform. The Duke and two other men wore top hats. The bunting, strung between trees behind the platform, had drooped. In the photo, the scene appeared rather sad. But it hadn’t been sad at all. There had been huge excitement that day. That was before the start of the war. Now, one of the visiting party in the photograph was dead: Colonel Farquhar, Commanding Officer of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, had already been killed in action at the Front.

The official opening of the girls’ new residence had actually happened after the royal visit, in October, the day before the children’s Hallowe’en party. Premier Hearst had visited to do the honours that day, but the girls had moved in long before that.

Grania now held up a palm to Fry.
Sunday
, she signed.
Church. Don’t go back to sleep.
Fry was off duty but in charge of getting the younger girls to breakfast. After that, she was responsible for taking the older Catholic children to St. Michael’s before seven. Like Grania, Fry was one of a few students who had stayed on at the institution to work after graduation. Fry worked in the big kitchen from which meals were served, nine months of the year, to more than three hundred children and staff. Towards the end of June, Fry and Colin would be married. Tall blond Colin had been in the Manual class with Fry when they were students, and now worked as Mr. Cedric’s assistant in the print shop.

The rest of Fry and Colin’s class had long since dispersed, as had Grania’s schoolmates from the Oral class. Many had returned to their parents’ homes to live. Some young men had left for type-setting
jobs in other cities. One boy, a good friend to Colin, worked in Pittsburgh and wrote to Colin frequently. In July, Colin and Fry would be moving to the upstairs of a house within walking distance of the school, where they had found three rooms to rent. In September, Fry would return to work in the kitchen, and Colin to the print shop.

Grania thought about Jim. He had been part of her life for more than eight months now, and he had managed this by appearing from a far-off place she knew nothing about—Prince Edward Island, by the sea. After her first meeting with him at the school hospital last fall, he’d persisted in returning to speak to her; he’d come back on the pretext of doing an errand for Dr. Whalen, even when there was no errand to invent. In the winter, with her parents’ permission, he had taken her to meet his Uncle Alex and Aunt Jean at their farm in the country, not far from Read. At Easter, he’d travelled by train with Grania to Deseronto for the day to meet her family. Tress and Kenan, who’d married the year before and now lived in rented rooms in a house on Dundas Street, had come to the hotel to join the rest of the family for dinner. Everyone had greeted Jim with enthusiasm except Grania’s parents, who had been courteous but cautious. “Bring him home,” Mother had written to Grania in advance of the visit. “But make no announcements.”

Were her parents worried about him going off to war, worried that Grania would be left alone? Kenan would be leaving soon, and Tress would be alone. Or were they concerned because Jim was a hearing man? In any case, there was no announcement to make. Not yet. But Grania knew it would come.

At home, Patrick had questioned Jim relentlessly when he discovered that he would be joining up in the fall. Patrick wanted to talk about nothing but the war. Bernard had greeted Jim warmly and quietly. Mamo declared to everyone, when Jim was not in the room, that it was plain to see that he cared very much for their Grania.

To Grania, Jim was a persistent and earnest young man who was full of hope. Being with him gave her hope—if anyone could dare to
hope during a war. Jim often hummed, his lips moving in some private song of his own. She said his name aloud, and smiled to herself. He had told her that when she spoke his name, it came out sounding like
Chim.

Grania did not know how events would unfold, any more than anyone did, heading into the summer months of 1915. She felt the tension underlying all talk of war; she saw the anxiety of families when a loved one in uniform said goodbye. She tried not to think about Jim joining up in the fall. Newspapers were predicting, as they had the previous autumn, that this time the war really would be over by Christmas. But a steady flow of young men continued to leave the country. More and more had signed up since the sinking of the
Lusitania.
And Grania knew, and Jim knew, that within months he would be leaving for
over there.

The previous fall, moments after Miss MacKay had introduced Grania to Jim in the bandage room, Miss Marks, Grania’s former teacher from her senior years, and now her friend, had come down the steps from outside, leading a long line of students who were arriving to have their measurements taken. Every fall, heights and weights were recorded and hair checked for nits. One by one, the numbers were entered in the student pages of the ledger called
Medical Records
, along with head, arm and leg measurements. These would be repeated in June, for comparison, at the end of the school year.

Miss Marks had left the pupils with Miss MacKay below, and followed Grania up the stairs. She fluttered her hand to get Grania’s attention.

“You’ve forgotten,” her lips said. She was smiling. “There’s a trick.” She swiped her hand across her own forehead,
forget.
Miss Marks had learned the sign language and always signed and spoke at the same time.

Grania frowned.
Trick?

“When you meet someone. I saw the young man downstairs. There are always tricks.”

Grania’s eyes, intent, watched the familiar lips.

“Tricks the deaf children have been teaching me ever since I first came here. I may be able to hear, but I’m always learning, too.”

“You’re the teacher who sees as much as we see.”

“Never so fast.”

“What trick?”

“If you’re worried about not being understood, get the person to talk. You take charge. We used to go over this in class. Ask questions while you’re watching lips, tongue, mannerisms—all the cues you need to give yourself time. You can lip read every person in this place, Grania. But the hearing world is out there beyond the gates.”

“I go back to it every summer.”

“Back to your family. Protection.”

“True.” Grania’s index finger arced forward off her chin,
true.
“You want me to
ingade
in conversation.”

They both laughed at their private joke. For years, Grania had understood one of the instructions in Articulation class to be
ingade in conversation.
Miss Marks had caught and corrected that, but only by chance, and long after Grania had finished school.

“Next time a young man arrives at the door…”

But Grania was already arguing with herself.

I could have stayed downstairs. I could have “engaged” in conversation. I could have said more. I know the words. I could have joined in.
But she had not. Jim Lloyd was a hearing man and she had run away. She had escaped to safety up the stairs.

At this moment, she was wishing that she had wakened earlier. She hurried around the corner of the main building, alert to aromas wafting from the kitchen. Cook would be preparing pancakes for hungry children who were being roused—older helping younger—and making their way through the halls to stand before rows of
sinks. As milking had to be done before breakfast, the farm boys were already up and out at the barns. On the dining tables there would be maple syrup in plenty this morning. Sugar snow had come and gone, farmers’ trees were tapped, the new syrup was in, the old no longer rationed. The children loved their syrup, and their Saturday-night candies, too, if they had a copper to spend when the basket was passed around.