Deaf American Prose: 1980-2010

Clark’s Wife

Joseph Santini 257 Clark’s Wife The backyard was dimming and full of the hum of crickets, lightning bugs, and the weird blue light of the gloaming. I sat on the porch, just out of window-shot, smoking one of my last few cigarettes, trying not to cry. I was grateful I had been here when my father died. I had wanted to be with him, and the suddenness of the first heart attack had made it seem impossible. We’d gotten me out of the city on Amtrak fairly quickly. I just left an email for my professors at college and ran to Penn Station. Now in our home north of Ardmore I felt trapped by memories. Every inch of the three-story brown house and large, tree-spotted yard had been built by my father’s hands. Was there anything I could see that wouldn’t bring back something? I doubted it. I remembered how it had been when we’d first arrived, thrown out of his father’s home (or did my mom and dad leave voluntarily? I’d forgotten). We’d been nearly penniless, and lived with friends of my parents until the land deal came through. Then there was a shack, and sometimes hotels if the weather sucked, and finally one day, age five, I walked into my own bedroom, on the third floor, a room which still had my name carved into the door, as if my father had meant it for me from the first. My father. He had been a square and blunt man. He’d balded early, and never spoke English at all beyond a grunt or two. He had been born Deaf and his family had always seemed bitterly disappointed in him—not like my mother’s, all Deaf like they were, a family that held her up and idolized her both for her charm and her intelligence. Yet my mother had loved him. She worshipped him—had worshipped him—like some people worshipped God. But she didn’t think about him much—just lived that way, her husband a magnetic pole she always faced, like the needle of a compass. When he died she went insane, a needle looking for a north pole which just wasn’t any longer. Nothing to face. We had had to hold her down in the hospital. And then after he died she stopped speaking. I didn’t mind much; I can sign as well as the Deaf side of our family, the Greythornes. It made people wonder, though, that first day after he died. All she did when they spoke at her was look at them. I couldn’t tell if it was pain in her eyes or something else. It was as if she didn’t understand where they were from anymore, without that compass point guiding her. Before my father died Mom spoke perfectly, when she wanted to; well, not perfectly, but well enough for anyone to understand her, although people always, always knew something was different. Sometimes she even functioned as an interpreter, for my father and his family. Strangers often asked if she was a foreigner. My father’s family, the Edgemunds, always spoke to her, never signed, although I’d heard them once or Main_Pgs_1-330.indd 257 3/28/2012 10:24:58 AM 258 Joseph Santini twice express willingness to learn, and had since come to realize it was a false willingness , frustrating in its transparent insincerity. Mom looks fairly foreign in these parts: she’s a short, thin woman with an even thinner Russian nose that tapers downward. Her skin is more olive and brown than cream. Her dark brown eyes are too close together to be really attractive, and of course this is the feature I had to inherit. Her face is so expressive that it seems to attract light and attention; her personality so vibrant that watching her sign with others, and copying her movements, became a game of sorts for me and my sister when we were really young, hoping against hope that one day we too would possess the same grace. It is obvious that she used to act before she got married; she is graceful, and her signing is large and clear and clean. Her personality is attractive to people in our community, and friends often come to see her and be with her, enjoying her chattering and her care. your mother is one giant hug, I remembered people saying...