Silent Time (15 page)

She tried to understand him, but there was no sign this time that she recognized, no gesture that held meaning in her world. More especially, she wondered how she could have anything to do with those little white marks on the black board?

Ten o'clock that night, George Batstone, the principal of the Halifax School for the Deaf, was reviewing correspondence by a small lamp. The stark blue light of the gas lamps on Gottigen Street poured over his shoulders through the office window.

The start of another year. The Newfoundlanders had arrived just in time for classes. With six new students, four boys and two girls, the contingent from the sister colony now stood at fourteen. Batstone was a little disappointed. There must be more deaf children in remote corners of that country yet to be discovered, or with parents yet to be persuaded to give them up for schooling. Still, he was pleased to note that the average age of the Newfoundland admissions was coming down. While it could be a problem to have the children too early, he had also found ten to be the latest possible age at which a child could benefit fully from the years at school. He was further pleased when he opened the letter from the Colonial Secretary's Office, hand delivered by the young Crawford fellow who chaperoned the children on the crossing, and found a cheque for $5,600.

They had agreed to his request for an additional one hundred dollars per student. Excellent!

Unfortunately, neither the Government of Nova Scotia nor the sister provinces had similarly complied. Batstone tiredly reviewed the letter of refusal from his own Premier's Office and began mentally drafting his reply:

We had the assurance of certain members of your government that we could count on the increase. The Board already has plans and specifications drawn up for an extension to the present building. This alone would cost $7,500. It was a great disappointment therefore…
and so on.

He would be forced to repeat what he had already stressed so emphatically in his letter to the Cabinet last May: that the school was opened thirty years ago to accommodate one hundred pupils, and that this year's enrolment exceeds one hundred and forty; that they are being forced to hold classes in the Assembly Hall and the Boys' and Girls' Recreation Rooms; that for the first time they have teachers living outside the school; that bedrooms and dormitories are overcrowded; that woodwork, printing and cobbling are all being taught in the same room; that they want to teach tailoring, another good trade for the deaf, but have no room for it; that they need additional rooms for recreation so they can more effectively separate the younger from the older students and, more importantly, the boys from the girls; that the laundry facilities are inadequate; that there's no indoor gymnasium; and, finally, that the doctor's report continually asks for more hospital rooms since effective isolation cannot be achieved.

Last year a boy of seven, Billy Sparkes from Newfoundland, died of scarlet fever. They buried him on a Saturday in February. The entire school formed a procession behind his little casket on the long walk to the cemetery where they laid him in the ground. The poor boy's parents couldn't afford to attend. There was no way to transport the body. It had been a difficult time. Since then the younger students lived in dread of seeing anyone go to the infirmary, or of going themselves, for fear of never being seen again, like poor Billy.

He was rubbing his eyes when his wife, Claire, walked into the room.

“Are they sorted out at last? Settled down?”

“The girls are anyway,” she said. “I imagine the boys will take a little longer. They usually do. Don't you think it's time we went home?”

“Home?” he laughed softly. “You always make it sound like we live across town instead of across the corridor.”

“It's still home, George, no matter how close, and I will not allow you to bring your work there. We need one place that's just for us.”

George still couldn't believe his good fortune, that this daughter of a Halifax merchant, whose family name happened to be Merchant, five years ago not only agreed to be his wife, but to come and live with him here at the school and work here like himself, but without pay. Claire was popular with the students, and made an excellent teacher's assistant, as long as she kept her, in his view, hastily formed opinions to herself. She also worried needlessly about his long hours of work. It was true his predecessor had died of overwork and worry, but that poor man had had to suffer through the Halifax explosion and its brutal aftermath.

Still, George didn't like to dissuade Claire from being solicitous. In fact, though he often adopted a pose of willing sacrifice, he was secretly thankful when she insisted he go home to spend time alone with her. He worshipped her. Without her, he'd be as lonely and celibate as a priest or, worse, unhappily married.

“Come and sit for a while first,” he said. “Tell me about your day.”

She threw herself into the visitor's chair. The light from the window cast a blue shimmer onto her black hair. She rested on her elbows and splayed her long legs in front of her, but her eyes did not meet his. He watched her pull out her combs and a wave of desire surged in him as her hair fell loosely about her neck and shoulders. It had been a long day for both of them.

Finally, she looked up at him, a little sadly.

“What's wrong, Claire?”

“Well, since you've asked, I may as well tell you. I had words with that new teacher, Sarah McLean. She slapped a child on the hands for signing.”

She seemed on the verge of tears, so he knew he would have to tread carefully.

“You know the policy on signing, dear, especially in speech class where it's strictly forbidden.”

“Yes, George, I know. It's to be discouraged, but this child wasn't even a returning student. Imagine having your hands slapped on your first day of school for signing to the friends you've just made. It lacks all compassion.”

“It sounds like Miss McLean was a little overzealous.”

“Overzealous! The woman has declared war on signing, George. I heard her say as much in the teachers' room the other day.”

“Miss McLean comes to us from the Braidwood Institute with the highest qualifications. She's trained in the very latest methods.”

“Is that so? Well, I'm afraid your
alma mater
has gone too far on this matter of signing, George. It's the language deaf people are born with. Why should we suppress it?”

“Suppress is a strong word, Claire. Discourage might be more appropriate in this instance, don't you think?”

The one disadvantage of Claire's rather privileged upbringing was this marked tendency she had to form her own ideas and express them without fear. She'd often tried his patience this way, discoursing on things about which she knew little or nothing.

“I never should have given you that book by the Abbé de L'Epée,” he continued, massaging a temple. “The ideas in it are archaic.”

“I don't think they are! When de L'Epée found deaf people signing to each other in the streets of Paris without benefit of an education, he realized their language was as natural to them as speech is to us. It's only in school that we force them to behave like hearing people.”

“We don't
force
them to do anything, Claire. We teach them to speak and lip-read so that they may function in a hearing world. Besides, you know as well as I do that we have signed instruction at this school.”

“Two out of eleven classes, George. There should be more. If it was up to the likes of Sarah McLean, it would be eliminated completely. Why on earth did you hire another speech teacher, anyway?”

“We needed one.”

“Only because the speech classes are so small. You get much better value out of signing and the students learn so much more. There's one more thing, George, and then I'll hold my piece. When is this school finally going to hire a deaf teacher?”

Now he regretted being drawn into this debate. Claire never tired of it, and he often indulged her, but he didn't have the heart for it just now.

“Signing is
not
a language, Claire,” he declared abruptly, with a firmness that he knew would not brook contradiction. “It is merely a symptom of deafness. That's the policy of the school and Sarah McLean was right to enforce it, even if she was, as I admitted, overzealous in the performance of her duties.”

He had the last word on all matters pertaining to the school. Claire knew that so, as he watched her go into a pout, he feared the rest of his evening was ruined.

“But I will be sure to tell her to go easy on the new arrivals,” he added.

To placate her further he mumbled the additional concession that Charles Michel, Abbé de L'Epeé, the legendary founder of the first public institution for the education of the deaf, was indeed a great, great man. His singular innovation was to bring, as he had put it, “through the window what could not be brought through the door.” This meant that he had learned the rudiments of visual sign language from the deaf themselves, improved upon it and used it for instruction.

But George had trained as an oralist and saw deafness as a disease for which speech training and lip-reading were curatives. In his view, de l'Epée had held sign language, and indeed the deaf themselves, in too high an esteem. George had often found the deaf to be unruly, improvident and given to excessive drink. David Gray, the tailor who had originally founded the Halifax School, was a perfect example; he'd been
forcibly replaced in short order, due to his excesses, by a properly trained hearing educator from the Braidwood.

Unfortunately, those who favoured using both sign and speech in instruction had gained ground since the turn of the century. Sign language was becoming more prevalent in schools and, although it went against all his background and training, it did look to George like he might have to hire at least one deaf teacher to keep up with the times. This eventuality he would avoid as long as possible, however, despite the urging of his good wife.

“But as I say, Claire,” he said, concluding his peroration on de L'Epée, “although his contribution to the education of the deaf is invaluable, his methods have long been discredited.”

“Well, I think the Abbé had it right. One day the deaf are going to show you oralists just how wrong-headed you've been all these years.”

“Can't we agree to disagree for now?” George said with a weak, defeated smile.

Claire smiled generously at last, enlivening him with instant hope of a safe resolution to this bickering. “Of course, dear,” she said.

“Good. Who was the student, by the way? The one whose hands were slapped.”

“It was little Dulcie Merrigan from Newfoundland. She was wearing a string of pearls, costume jewellery someone gave her, probably as a parting gift. On the crossing some children made her sign name a little movement across the throat like this.” She made the sign with her thumb and forefinger.
String of Pearls
they call her, although she doesn't know that yet. You should have seen her face when that woman chastised her, George. She couldn't believe it. She was just sharing her new name with some new friends.”

Her voice broke at the recollection and his love for her broke inside him like a river through a dam. He would flay Sarah McLean from head to toe for her sake, but he would never say so; he could never give her the power of that knowledge.

“Did the child cry?”

“She did not. But the poor thing looked so confused. She might have cried if I hadn't whisked her away from there and got her mind on happier things. Really, George, you have to speak to that woman.”

“I will, I will. I promise. After all, it
is
only the senior students who are absolutely forbidden to sign in class.”

“As if you could stop them. They're all signing, George, behind your backs, and I refuse to tell on them.”

“And since you're working for free, I don't see how I can force you. So we'll say no more about it then, shall we? For tonight?”

“No, you're right, darling.” She stood and reached for his hand. “Let's not argue any more tonight. Let's just go home to bed.”

The city of St. John's was falling asleep under a wet, mid-December snowfall. Sir John Crawford watched an uncertain whiteness struggle to cover the dark ground outside his Devon Place home. His den was at the back of the house, his desk lodged in a wide bay window overlooking the banks of the Waterford River as it coursed toward St. John's Harbour. He saw the thick snowflakes descend and disappear into its restless black surface. Others settled one by one onto the naked trees, masking the branches that reached like tender suppliants into the starlit evening sky. Night had fallen without the slightest breeze.

The finance minister was exhausted. He poured himself a drink, sipped, and set it down next to a black and white photograph on his desk. He picked up the photograph. It was from the year 1910 and showed the members of the House of Assembly posing on the steps of the Colonial Building. He stood in the third row in a tilted derby hat, the only one clean-shaven, a rakish, smiling youthfulness about him. He'd been just thirty-three, the youngest man in the House of Assembly, part of a new breed of rising young entrepreneurs. He sparkled next to the side-burned, bearded old men in long dark coats and Edwardian top hats. Seventeen years ago he'd represented a new optimism in a world of opportunity. Today, he wondered if a man could really be over and done with at fifty.

He laid the photograph flat to avoid the painful present-day comparison.

He intended tonight to put his thoughts on the disastrous state of the country's finances in a letter to the prime minister. He knew it would likely serve no good purpose. Walter Stanley Monroe was as powerless as himself to stop the whirling vortex of debt that was bringing the county to its knees. Still, he meant to pass the evening doing it anyway, while consuming the better part of the Glenfiddich he'd just opened. A wave of futility swept through him as he dipped his fountain pen and began: