In the Memorial Room (16 page)

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Authors: Janet Frame

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BOOK: In the Memorial Room

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I’ll shout if I like, I thought.

—So you see I’m not dumb.

Connie took the paper and wrote, —We know you’re not dumb. Your voice is too loud. Did you know? We must go now. We hope your deafness doesn’t interfere with your writing.

Max took the paper then, and wrote, —We hope you’ll think seriously about your condition. Medicine is always dearer in another country.

I wrote in reply, —Everything is always comparative in another country. Crooks are crookeder, grass is greener, heights are higher, words are wordier, pleasures are more pleasurable, death is deader, life is livelier, dogs are doggier, fortune is more fortunate, vaults more vaulted, distance is further, water more watery, blue is bluer, grey is greyer, fame more famous, continuance more continuing, consumers more consumed, reality more real, fantasy more fantastic, adjustments more adjusted, fires more fiery, chaos more chaotic…I mean to say…

(Both Connie and Max were beginning to look impatient at my cataloguing.)

—I also mean to say, the deaf are deafer and the dumb are dumber. Is that not so?

—You mustn’t be bitter, Connie wrote. Remember you’re the Watercress-Armstrong Fellow.

I smiled as I shook hands with them, in the French way, as I saw them out the front door.

Remember you’re the Watercress-Armstrong Fellow.

How will I forget it? I thought, wishing I would let myself speak, shouting or no shouting but I did not want the hyacinths, just breaking into bud by the door, to curdle and curl their blue petals all for the sake of a human voice that from now on had to go out of my mouth alone, without any guidance, and which in its confusion might give the impression of rage or hate, any emotion, all in a frightening incongruity enough to scare the words back into my mouth.

I did not want to see a scarred or burned track like a no man’s land wherever my spoken words passed by; I did not want to destroy the ordinary vegetation of ordinary conversation, the desultory communication that accomplishes its dull purpose of communicating without undue melodrama or tragedy or even comedy.

I did not want my words to be, unknown to me, missiles, sticks and stones.

I knew that I had not felt, before, this tenderness towards words. Somehow I had always thought they could look after themselves, they could be used and even abused and they would always recover or sleep it off within the pages of the dictionary where most of them spent most of their time anyway. I suppose it will affect my writing, I thought. My being deaf. Deaf-and-dumb. And all these words with no sound to them and even their inner sound doomed to a gradual diminishing. The musical notes, at least, can look after themselves, they’re nonentities, slabs of vanilla, spaghetti, it is
they
who are the sticks and stones, they have no reliance on the human mouth and the human ear; we eavesdrop on words; music eavesdrops on our ears.

Eavesdrop.

What a dew filled word it sounded,
sounded
in my still inviolate inner ear. Eavesdrop.

In a world of lost eaves. Eaves had scarcely been my word at all. My word was ‘gutter’, ‘spouting’. The word ‘eaves’ was at peace in a literary world.

I eavesdropped.

I overheard. I underheard.

I think that as Connie and Max Watercress went out the gate they called out to me, —Michael and Grace are coming to see you in a couple of days.

I did not hear them. Nor did I read their lips. I knew what they said, my knowing a combination of intuition, common sense and a grasp of the momentary intersection of circumstance and people and an imagination of the signposts which the people carried or remarked in their minds. I was to learn to use this intuition with increasing skill that often led others to suppose that I was not always deaf or completely deaf, that I could ‘switch on or off’ at will. This idea of the deaf hearing only what they want to hear is a neat explanation which survives as clichés and commonplaces do, by its neatness and apparent unassailability. It is wishful thinking, the longing to reclaim the power of mind over body particularly when an overwhelming illness or disability has washed in like an eroding tide over the shores of the body. In my deafness I could not hear what I thought that I wanted to hear. I could hear nothing.

Constantly I was aware also that by being deaf and not blind I was being deprived of some romantic fulfilment of a finer tragedy. The comparison between deafness and blindness occupied those who knew me. There would be long debates on whether it was ‘better’ to be deaf or blind, always with the assumption that one affliction was necessary. The first remark of many people meeting me for the first time and knowing of my deafness was:

—It’s better than being blind, anyway.

—I suppose you’re glad you’re not blind.

Then would follow, if two or more people had come to ‘cheer me up’ or for whatever other reason, the discussion about which
they’d
rather be. It was a game they played, like the child’s game of choosing between two offered treats, both equally enticing – a golden ring or a silver casket, a castle or a farm with two hundred head of cattle; or even marriage partners – a princess or a scullery maid. At times their discussion became so clinical that it reminded me of a conference of insurance agents meeting to put a price on lost eyes and hearing and other facilities and pleasures and limbs; fortunately I remained unpriced.

I was still ‘at home’, after three weeks of deafness, when the final visitors (among those connected in some way with the Fellowship and Rose Hurndell) arrived: Michael and Grace Watercress.

Michael looked afraid and diffident. It was Grace who opened the conversation, —Is there anything you need?

—No thanks. What are you doing these days?

I could see that Michael was relieved to take his mind from my deafness, yet it was not he who answered.

—He’s working on a novel.

I felt pangs of jealousy. Take over the Fellowship? Why shouldn’t he? He’d already been an understudy and even moved into the role. His appearance was so much his ally. The easily identifiable writer; whereas I had long experience of being ignored because I resembled a clerk, a doctor, a commercial traveller, anything but the accepted idea of a ‘writer’. I wondered then at the feelings of an understudy who never takes over the major role at the last minute.

I wrote, —Congratulations. Some day he’ll be applying for the Watercress-Armstrong Fellowship.

—Sooner than you think, Grace wrote, glancing proudly at Michael.

What a paragon of a writer he was! I simply couldn’t deny it. If I’d had any of my books with me I could have walked to the bookshelf and opened any volume with photos of writers and found Michael Watercress among the great Russians, the Americans, the French, the English; he was international. His eyes and face were intelligent as far as liveliness can be equated with intelligence, and although I did feel a sneaking jealousy of his ability to play the role in costume of a writer I felt that perhaps (in spite of his wife’s and his parents’ repeated reference to the ‘the young Hemingway’) his talent did not match his appearance. I was pre-judging, not having read his work, but I felt that he lacked the singleness of purpose necessary. His thoughts and the thoughts of others were constantly on what he would achieve, on what he would become, in a pleasantly anticipated future, while the present lay just at hand, all the riches in the world ignored and untouched. It was scarcely Michael’s fault. I could see that his clever childhood had been a grooming, an anticipation, for the future use of his many talents, and he had fallen into the habit of tomorrow which in a man of thirty-three shows a rosy promise beginning to wither and arouses pity rather than admiration. Poor chap, I thought. He’s already going to seed. Destroyed by his promising future. A man without a past or present. Was he not then a completely unmetaphorical man, deprived of time?

Now that I was deaf, I was becoming more used to interior monologues, of the type that had always bored me when I tried to read fiction. Within the past few weeks, however, I had been so shocked at the banality of my paper conversations that I almost resolved to give them up; I’d come across pages and pages of seeming ‘manuscript’ only to find them covered with:

—We hope you’re feeling better.

—I am thank you.

—Are you sure you’re permanently deaf?

—Oh yes.

—You must not forget how to speak. Speak.

—Speak Philip Sparrow, Speke!

—What do you mean?

—It’s a quotation.

—I see. Anyway it’s better than being blind or crippled.

—How do you know?

—It must be, surely.

—How do you know?

—Surely.

—Surely what?

—It’s better to be deaf than blind.

—Why?

—You’re less dependent for one thing. You can walk around on your own. Though you can’t hear the traffic. Can you hear the traffic?

—No.

—Not at all?

—No.

—You want to be careful then. The driving’s reckless. It’s a foreign country, remember.

—Oh yes. A foreign country. The dead are deader, the grass is greener, etc. and the reckless are more reckless.

—You will be careful, won’t you?

—Yes yes.

—I am so glad you’re not blind or crippled.

Always, you see, they had the last word. It amused me, in my interior monologues, to suppose what the last word might be. And what, indeed, was the first word?