Silent Time (22 page)

William could see that the image was rough-hewn at the edges, but it still made a fine portrait.

“It's beautiful,” he said.

“Cup of tea?” This was something new from Leona. He gathered that, some time after Sir John's demise, she'd quietly finished with bootlegging and having liquor in the house altogether. He suspected it was because of Dulcie, too, who was in her early teens now and likely uncomfortable with the practice herself.

He nodded and she went to the kitchen to prepare it. She returned with milk, sugar, two teacups and a steaming pot of tea on a circular tin tray. She poured and sat back across from him on the three-legged stool. He sensed a quiet excitement in her, a secret anticipation. His suspicion was confirmed when she took a letter from the pocket of her skirt and laid it on the table between them.

“This came two days ago,” she said. “I want you to read it.”

William picked up the envelope with its one tattered end and looked at the return address. It was from Halifax, Gottigen Street. He was still accustomed to handling little official matters for Leona, but when he looked for the School for the Deaf letterhead on the envelope, it wasn't there.

“Are you sure, Leona? It looks personal.”

“It's all right,” she said. “I want you to read it.”

He removed and opened the letter. The cursive writing was done, in pencil, in an over-large uncertain hand. But there was a smoothness to it, a shapeliness to the lettering that showed this person would one day possess a deft, clear handwriting style.

Dear Mother
,

I am so happy today. We go skating on the rink outside. It is very cold but we have so much fun I do not mind. My cheeks burn when I come back inside. The whole class have hot chocolate in Assembly Hall. Girls and boys together. The boys make funny faces at me and friends, but we do not mind
.

Is Dan good? He is getting old now, so I hope he not work too hard. Haha. I hope everybody well at home. Please say hello for me to Mr. W. J. Cantwell, too
.

I have a good friend here, Sophie, from Trinity Bay. She help my English with writing letters. I am sorry I take so long to write but I want to make it very good this time. I hope you like it.

I want see you soon. Just three and half months more and I am home again. But I am good here and happy and well. I wish you come meet me in St. John's, but I understand there is no money for it. I come with Mr. Norris like last year. He is a good man. I still remember poor Mr. Crawford. He is in heaven now. God bless him
.

Mother, I think of you every day. I want you proud of me here in Halifax. Next year I will go class upstairs with older boys and girls. I will start the high school. I can not wait for it.

I work hard here and am very good for you. I love you
.

Your daughter
,

Dulcie

He looked up and saw that she was crying. No words passed between them, just an occasional soft laugh. He reached out and took her hand. She looked up, surprised at first, then squeezed his hand and smiled through her tears.

Ah, it's a good day, he thought. A very good day.

Dulcie lay awake in her bed in the school dormitory. The pale blue gas light that gave her such comfort in her early days here was, as always, flooding the room. She had noticed over time, though, that the light was motionless, not like the moonlight that came shimmering into her bedroom in Knock Harbour at night.

She was thinking of home.

She was remembering one July evening last summer when Maggie Tobin and some other girls from Sheep Cove had walked to Knock Harbour to meet her. There was a warm breeze on her face and arms that evening. They'd all gone to the dance in Paddy's Cove. She felt the thing called music in the buckling of the floor, saw its rhythm in the dancing bodies, its fire in the shining eyes and hot faces of the players and dancers. She joined in the square sets and, in between, several boys in turn invited her to do a three-step waltz. She did her best to put them at ease. The boys there were unable to say much to her.

She and the girls walked home later by the generous light of the moon. The gravel road and the roadside alders were bathed in its silvery glow. The girls talked and laughed happily and occasionally did elaborate pantomimes for Dulcie's benefit to include her in their jokes about the boys. They took turns walking arm-in-arm with her along the winding road.

Home at last, contented and tired, she'd gone straight to bed. But then, alone in her room with the restless moonlight, looking through the window at its shimmer on the water, a familiar feeling stirred and scurried around her insides.

Dulcie had missed Halifax that night.

Poor Dulcie was confused. When she was home she missed Halifax. In Halifax, she missed home. The trouble was, she realized now as she lay wide awake in the school dormitory, that she missed Halifax more. She thought of Halifax even on the summer days when it was hard not to be in love with Knock Harbour, with making hay in the meadows or curing
Uncle Edward's fish on the beach. She thought of Halifax despite the dances on the Shore, despite the quaint Sunday masses in the little church where they once tried to make her go to school, despite the old ritual of trouting in the brook, despite old Dan, and even, though she could barely bring herself to think it, despite the fact that Mother lived there. Tonight in Halifax, here in the glow of the gas lamps with her closest friends in the world asleep all around her, Knock Harbour seemed to her a distant, dark and lonely place.

For the past two years she had watched with increasing envy as the older boys and girls, some of them her own age, made their way upstairs in the school. This year, at last, she would complete the entrance requirements for high school. Next fall, she would take her place among those older students.

Maybe she would meet a nice boy there. She was tired of being teased and tormented by the downstairs boys who did nothing but make strange faces, and sometimes vulgar gestures, at her and her friends. She wanted to learn to sign and speak as confidently as the older students did, to read and write English just as well. She read with envy the material they wrote for the school newspaper. She wanted to behave sensibly and maturely like them. She wanted to be a woman, or even a lady like Mrs. Batstone.

What's more, Dulcie adored Halifax, not just for school, but for its movie houses, bookstores, streets and alleyways, skating rinks, churches, corner stores and shops and cafes. There was so much opportunity, so much learning, so many sensations, emotions, games and laughter. Plus, things at school had gotten better and better; even the troublesome Miss McLean had warmed to her over time. As a result, in the last couple of years, not even the intense beauty of the Cape Shore could tame the restless urge for Halifax that Dulcie felt once she was back in Knock Harbour. She longed, especially, for the easy acquaintance of deaf friends. Summers on the Shore sometimes left her feeling as lonesome as she'd ever been. That loneliness vanished every fall on the boat back to Halifax. That was the simple truth. Halifax was where she belonged.

Claire Batstone paced around George's office rubbing her hands together to get the chill out of them. She had taken the small girls skating today on the outdoor rink below the school, and although the youngsters seemed impervious to the cold, she'd finished by feeling so brittle she thought she'd break. That was hours ago and she still felt the frost in her bones. She threw herself into a chair and pulled a woollen shawl around
her shoulders. “I hate winter!” she declared. “I was destined for warmer climes. George, promise you'll take me away from all this one day.”

“Don't worry, dear,” said George, poring over some accounting ledgers. “We'll be spending our retirement in Scotland, as I've always said.”

“Not
Scotland!
I don't mean Scotland, for goodness sakes. It's colder there than here sometimes. Worse. The cold gets in your bones here, but in Scotland there's a miserable dampness that inhabits your soul. No, George, I insist on somewhere hot. Jamaica. Or Tahiti. Yes, that's it. You can do like the painter Gauguin did and escape to Tahiti, but you can't leave your wife and children behind like he did. That would be too awful.”

“We don't have any children,” George said quietly without looking up.

“But we might, George. Soon. Very soon. Who knows? Until then we'll content ourselves with looking after other people's, won't we?”

“Indeed we will, dear.”

“George?”

He knew something was coming and he couldn't resist directing a half-smile at something in the ledger.

“Claire?”

“I was noticing today how tall and lovely Dulcie Merrigan has become. She really does possess a natural grace, and she's so good with the new students. She has a natural ability to put them at ease.”

George looked up and rubbed his tired eyes. “She's taken a number of them under her wing in the last few years, hasn't she?”

“It's because she's older than so many of them now. It's a good thing she'll be starting with the older girls next year. It's about time, really. I mean, some of the small girls have actually taken her for a teacher.”

“Suddenly, I think I see where this is going.”

Claire laughed with delight. “Of course you do. It's part of my little plan to make sure that you have at least one deaf teacher working here in five years. Dulcie Merrigan would be the perfect one.”

“Why is that?”

“Well, she's got exactly four years of school left before she finishes high school. She'll be twenty then, a fine educated young woman and a perfect candidate for a year of teacher's training at Gaudillet College in Boston.”

“Where would the money come from for that?”

“I'll find it, George. You know I can.”

It was true. Some years Claire's charm brought as much money into the school from private benefactors as George's hard-nosed approach did from the government.

“I don't quite understand your singular devotion to this girl. I mean, Dulcie is bright and lovely, there's no mistake, but you've been protective of her from the very first, haven't you?”

“I see her growing every day. There's so much potential in her.”

“No more than in many of our students, Claire.”

“She's an only child, George. What is she to do after she's finished school? What has she to go home to in a place like Knock Harbour? Even St. John's must be a difficult place for a deaf person with no family to help them. She could do so much better here with us in Halifax and have such a good life for herself.”

“We do everything we can for our students, dear, but we have to let them go, too, at a certain point, to live their own lives.”

“Not Dulcie!” Claire seemed very definite on the point. “She needs us. She can't wait to start high school and she's destined for higher learning after that. Come on, George. It's hardly favouritism to help a young woman realize her dreams.”

“Is it her dream to become a teacher?”

“It is, whether she knows it yet or not! I dare not put such a hope into her mind until I know for certain it will come true. Let me try, George. That's all I'm asking. It's four years away. Let me quietly see if I can find a private sponsor for her. You know the public taste for deaf teachers is improving, and you really ought to be able to say that someone is being groomed. Let Dulcie be one of them. There may be others as well, but let me look after her.”

“I have no objection, Claire. See what you can do. We can start a private fund and add to it piecemeal.” George got back to his work and missed the broad smile on Claire's face. “But she's going to have to work extra hard on the math requirement,” he added.

“Understood. I know it's the one area where she struggles. But it'll be seen to. She's a hard worker and the students love her. She'll make a fine teacher someday. I know she will.”

Dulcie received a letter from Leona before she got home that June, telling her, among other things, that Newfoundland had a new government and that Mr. W. J. Cantwell was back in office. Dulcie was happy for him.

She found late June a good time to come home. The work in Knock Harbour was at a minimum, then, and the outdoors at its most generous. Leona's gardens were planted, but not advanced enough to need weeding. Capelin were already harvested and spread in the meadows and gardens; the haymaking was still a long way off. Meanwhile, the deciduous trees had leaved, the evergreens were nurturing fresh buds, the meadow grasses had arisen and begun their summer greening. Scattered blooms appeared by walkways and meadow paths.

That summer Dulcie decided she was done with trouting in the brook. She judged it was an unseemly thing for a young lady to do.

Dulcie's hair was long now, and intensely black. Her girlish round face had become fine-boned and thin, and she'd inherited her father's slim body. On this particular day she was wearing a short-sleeved cotton dress with a light green floral print. She had on her well-shined, sensible shoes; the soles had been replaced only once, in the cobbling workshop at school.

Leona had gone over to Paddy's Cove for some reason and Dulcie thought it was a good time to give the house a good sweeping.

She began in the parlour. As she leaned over to reach her broom under the settle she felt an old urge to slip her hand between the frame and seat cushion to search for hidden treasure. She'd once found a penny there in childhood. Her hand was bigger now, though, and she found she had to press the seat cushion down with her knee in order to get her hand into the narrow gap. She felt about the dark, tiny space with her fingers.

She drew out a block of four stamps. They appeared brand new. She read the curious red inscription stamped across each one:
AIR MAIL / DE PINEDO / 1927
.