Deafening Read Online Free PDF Page B

ample suits. They give him a pipe for his hand, a trunk for a voyage, a long beaver coat, and a ladder to climb should he desire to work outside. They hold the man’s face close to the lady’s, and they make them kiss, a rapid cardboard peck. They lift the tabs and remove the clothes and let the man and lady stare at each other in their underwear. The man is always known as Oscar. The lady is never given a name.
    Sometimes Oscar doesn’t listen to his lady. To teach Oscar a lesson, the lady goes travelling by herself. She is given a Saratoga trunk and a cabin bag for her trip. When Oscar speaks to the children, it is to tell them to eat with their mouths closed and to have good manners. The children, especially the girls, pay attention but they never have ears. Nor do the ladies. Not Grania’s ladies. Tress doesn’t care if an ear is showing but Grania chooses girls and ladies whose rolls or puffs of hair cover their ears. If their hair is swept high, or bunched on top so that tiny bits of earlobe are showing, Grania rejects them. Her girls and ladies do not need ears. They can manage perfectly well without.
    “Mother,” she calls softly. “Mother.”
    She repeats the word in a flattened way, hoping that the voice coming out of her is not too urgent, hoping that it will bring Mother, without anger or impatience, to her side.
    Grania is hot; her hair is stuck to her temples. Her limbs ache; her throat hurts.
    “Mother.” A staccato call, a persistent code telegraphed through the dark.
    Tress appears by the side of the bed. “What’s the matter?” She makes their private sign, palms up. She’s squinting through the shadows. “It’s late.”
    “I’m sick. I want Mother.”
    “You’re not calling loud enough. She’ll never hear.” Tress opens her mouth and hollers, “Mo-ther! Graw needs you!”
    But it is not Mother who comes, but Mamo. Mother is at the hotel, making dough for tomorrow’s chicken pot pies. Work at the hotel is never finished. It is Mamo who hears the call.
    Mamo removes the gown from Grania’s body. Washes and soothes; brings down the fever; tucks back the red hair and blows warm breath into Grania’s ear. She crosses the room and holds a hand to Tress’s forehead, but Tress is cool and fast asleep. It is Grania who succumbs to colds or La Grippe when the germs are going around. The scarlet fever that made her deaf seems to have weakened her, made her vulnerable to illness. Grania and Bernard are the two to be watched. Bernard, seventeen now, was born with the bad lung. The other two, Tress and Patrick—their father says—are as strong as two oxen in a yoke. Tress, now nine, inherited the high forehead, the dark eyes and dark brown hair of her mother, along with her mother’s strength.
    Mamo thinks of Agnes as a young girl—a dark-eyed girl who ran on her toes before she walked, who delighted in play and expressed herself in laughter. Her father’s girl. His child of joy, their firstborn. But weeks after the family sailed away from Ireland, Agneswas forced to watch her father’s wrapped body slide into the sea. Strong and healthy when they left Ireland, he succumbed to fever on the ship, a fever that hopped like a deathly flea from one sleeping person to the next in the open quarters below. The sheet was wrapped round and round him; the crew stood in silence to one side of his body and remained there while a group of women Mamo scarcely knew wailed and prayed on the other. They faced the silent men as if wailing would hold the crew responsible for the poor food and the lack of fresh air below, and the shortage of water.
    Mamo and Agnes stood together, and the sea mist wet their hair, and neither uttered a sound. Their hands rested on the damp shoulders of the three younger children. Mamo clutched the small wooden cross that had belonged to her husband, and after the body disappeared beneath the waves of the dark sea, she went below and placed the cross in the O’Shaughnessy trunk,