A forgotten language
Michael Tod PowersFor the last twelve years of her life, my sister lived alone on an island a long way from the city that had always been our home and was mine still. Whenever I wanted to see her I had to drive six hours and then ride the final hour to the island on a ferry. We had never really been close, and by then she was close to no one. Our mother had her scandalously early in life, and me almost impossibly late. There were twenty-three years between us, and by the time of her last illness even I was what most people would call an old man, so it shouldn’t have surprised me that she was dying. Still, it didn’t seem right. Had I really come so near the threshold?
I didn’t see her often. The physical distance between us was great, and even when she was healthy she never made that trip herself. The first time I saw her sick, she had already been sick for a long time. She sat upright as she always had, her body sunk into the couch cushions, an array of jewel-colored pills on her lap in one of those plastic trays with a separate compartment for each day of the week.
“How’s what’s-her-name?” she said.
She meant my wife, Mattie, who had been my wife for sixteen years and whose name she most certainly knew.
“Sorry,” she said. “The medication makes me forgetful.”
I had no way to know how true that was—whether she had really forgotten or whether she had pretended to forget in order to reiterate her non-recognition of my second marriage. She had
loved my first wife, as I had. In driving that first wife away I had deprived her of a friend, and she had never forgiven me.
She had liver cancer, stage four, though really by then it was just cancer everywhere, and the doctors were only seventy percent sure it had started in her liver.
The whole time we spoke, the hospice nurse was in the kitchen washing what looked like dozens of tiny glass containers one by one with a thin wire brush.
“She doesn’t talk much,” my sister said, “for which I’m grateful. Not like the last one.”
“You’re too far away,” I said. “Why did you move out here all alone? How am I supposed to get to you? I have a job. I have a family.” I heard the way my voice sounded—not authoritative and disapproving as I had meant it to, but pleading, as if for forgiveness.
“We all make our choices,” she said.
She had chosen solitude a long time ago, and now she was going to die alone but for the hospice nurse, a thin-lipped, stoopshouldered woman whose best quality, apparently, was that she rarely spoke. Who was I to say she should have wanted things to be otherwise?
I don’t remember how long I stayed that time. A couple of days, it would have been. I remember that it was late at night when I rode the ferry back to the mainland, and looking down from the upper deck I saw a school of bioluminescent jellyfish just beneath the surface of the water, the spectral blue light of their intertwined bodies extending in a line toward the horizon. There was a full moon quite low in the sky, and I heard someone say that normally the jellyfish lived at great depths, in darkness, and that it was either the light of the moon or the pull of its gravity that drew them upward.
Years before, I took a solitary drive to one of the less populated towns along the island’s northern edge, and in a deli there I met a
married couple even older than my sister was, who spoke to one another often in sign language even though neither of them was deaf. They caught me staring, which is how I met them. I was embarrassed, but they were kind. I had noticed that they spoke as well as signed, and that neither of them seemed to have any trouble understanding the other no matter which language they used, and this made me curious.
“It’s an old language,” the woman said, “and he only knows what of it I’ve taught him, which is what little I remember from the old days, when my mother was alive, and probably half of what I remember I remember wrong.”
“I say it’s right anyway,” the man said, “since there’s no one around who can say if it’s wrong.”
For more than two hundred years, that part of the island had been home to the highest concentration of hereditary deafness anywhere in the known history of the world. For most of that time there was no such thing as tourism, no such thing as a summer home, and island towns in New England were more isolated than they are now. It’s almost entirely forgotten now, even among the few people who live there year round, but back then the town had its own language, known universally in that small place and unheard of anywhere else on earth. So many people in town were deaf that everyone there knew the sign language and took it up as a matter of the simplest politeness whenever any of their deaf friends and neighbors was present. There’s a book about all this, written forty years ago by an anthropologist who went around interviewing the last old people who knew the language, before they all died. The thing the anthropologist keeps remarking on in the book is that whenever her interview subjects talked about the deaf people they had known, the person’s deafness was not the first or even the second thing they remembered about them. Often they seemed hardly sure the person had been deaf. “Oh, Peter,”
they’d say. “He was a great fisherman, a joker, bit of a drunk. I suppose he must have been deaf and dumb, now that you mention it. I don’t think I ever heard him speak.”
I didn’t know any of that when I was talking to the old couple in the deli. I didn’t want to ask too many questions. What they had was a language known only to them, in which a few private jokes and a few expressions of love or anger or frustration had flourished for years and decades, growing all the time more tangled and complex, while the rest had died away. I thanked them for their kindness to a stranger and left them to their lunch. I never saw them again. By now they must surely both be dead.
I called up Mattie on the phone later that day, but she was busy with her job and the house and the kids and tired of waiting for me to figure out what I wanted to say.
“I have to go,” she said. “Was there something?” and patient as ever she waited while I listened to the sound of her breath against the receiver. Our daughter was two then, and distantly I could hear her crying in another room.
“All right,” I said. “Nothing. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
I was still young when my first wife left me, though I didn’t think of myself that way then. We had no children, which made it easier. She had been offered a job in a faraway city, and she simply took it, knowing that I wouldn’t follow her, though I had nothing much to hold me where I was. What did I have? The way the rain filtered through the ground and ran down the walls of the subway tunnel, and the smell of that clean water in that unclean place, and the putrid smell of gingko berries crushed on the sidewalk, and the fan-shaped leaves of the gingko trees casting shadows that danced and swarmed on the ground like a murmuration of dragonflies. Mostly the memory of the way these things felt when I first noticed them. I was recovering then from something I’d been suffering
from for years without knowing it, like a fever—something to do maybe with the death of my mother, with drinking too much, with who knows how many years of bad feelings unacknowledged and unexamined. It all broke suddenly the way a fever breaks, and the recovery made me more strange to myself and to others than the fever had. Each day I spent hours wandering alone, trying to encounter in the world images and sensations that probably had only ever existed in my memory. I understand this made me difficult to live with.
She called me up weeks after she’d moved away, to ask me how things were going. We were going to remain friends. She was concerned about me. I asked her how the job was.
“Stressful,” she said. “There’s a lot to learn.” But I could hear in her voice how good it felt to be at the beginning of something, to be moving forward instead of standing still, wishing nothing would change.
For a while, long ago, my sister lived with two other women in a small apartment way up in the Bronx, near the Westchester County line, and when she thought I was old enough our mother let me ride the train from Brooklyn to visit her there. She lived high up in an old brick building where hundreds of other people must have lived at the same time, and when you stepped into the elevator in the lobby and the doors closed you had to wait in that small, mirrored room for a long, long time before they opened again. The halls were long and narrow and windowless and smelled of other people’s cooking, and the rooms where my sister and her friends lived were cramped and dim, but from the little window in the little kitchen you could see the broad expanse of the Hudson gleaming, the Palisades green and formidable on the other side, the George Washington Bridge looking ephemeral in the distance, only sometimes visible, like the gateway to another world. The
other women came and went about their own routines. I still remember their improbable names—Bethany and Stella. When they were all together they laughed loudly and told each other comically painful stories about the men they knew as if I wasn’t there.
I probably visited that apartment only three or four times in my life, and now they’ve all run together in my memory. I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen, and my sister was thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven. Eventually she moved out and got a studio apartment all her own in Brooklyn, and though she was closer then I saw her even less. She got married and lived for six years with her husband in the same studio apartment, and after he left she seemed to see less and less of anyone.
I said we were never close, but strictly speaking that can’t be true, since for a while when I was very small she spent more time caring for me than our mother did. My father had left our mother, as my sister’s father had done many years earlier, and our mother had taken a second job to make up for the loss of his half of the rent. I was two and then three and then four, and my sister moved back home, for years, to care for me while our mother worked and slept and worked. I have no memory of that time, and my sister never told me anything about it. Our mother told me, many times over many years, to make sure I didn’t forget.
Later, when our mother was no longer there to remind me, I had to remind myself. Years after my first marriage had ended, my sister called me collect from a county jail north of Albany. There was a factory up there where they made long-range missiles for use in America’s various faraway wars, and she’d gotten herself arrested painting the enormous glass front door of the place in pig’s blood. The idea was to smear the blood over the bodies of the actual weapons. She had gallons of it in Ziploc bags in her backpack, but the locked door was as far as she got. She’d bashed at it with a
crowbar, but it was made from some kind of unbreakable glass. By then she’d already cut through two wire fences and walked across acres of open field under the gaze, for all she knew, of men with rifles. The cop who took my bail money told me she was lucky. If she’d made it past the door it would have meant prison time.
It was late at night when we left the jailhouse, and we had hours of driving ahead of us. We stopped at an all-night diner in Rome or Troy or one of those towns and I bought her a cheeseburger she didn’t touch and a coke from which she took tiny, birdlike sips, leaving the glass on the table and lowering her lips to the straw like a child.
“They’re killing kids with those things,” she said in her small voice. “Mothers and babies.”
“Good thing you stopped them,” I said.
I don’t know why I said that. Sometimes a situation arises in which I know I have to say something, and I search my brain and fail to find a single thing that isn’t mean.
She was lighting matches, dipping her fingers into her water glass and pinching the flame to extinguish it, again and again. There was a pile of damp, spent matches on the table in front of her. She was fifty-six years old. A few hours earlier she’d been trying to break down a glass door with a crowbar.
By our mother’s account I was an exhausting child when I was small. I could never find the words to say what I wanted, and I cried all the time. In those years when my father was suddenly, inexplicably gone and my mother was out of the house nearly all the time, I must have been much worse than even she remembered. It was my sister who held me then, sang to me probably, until I fell asleep. I can’t remember those songs now. I can’t remember who or what I was when I heard them, but she can.
