6

[Bid papa buy a pie]

I kept the feather in my pocket like a talisman even though it could do little but tell apart my Bs and Ps. At night I practiced with my head resting on the pillow, the feather and its telltale barbs a few inches from my lips. Puh, puh, puh, I said while Adeline’s boarders slept in the rest of the house. The feather didn’t grimace or puzzle at my utterances. It fluttered, as if stroked by my words.

Soon there was an ivory plug as well as the feather. I needed to bite down and not let it fall from my teeth while I spoke. Mr. Bell gave me a small book called a “Progressive Indicator” which was filled with symbols. Closed and open horseshoes, lines with hooks at each end, 3s that were not threes and Ws that were not double-Us, and elongated s-shapes like the raised heads of a snake.

“Read this line,” he wrote, and glided his pen across my Progressive Indicator.

I read it carefully. “Read the next one,” he said.

I watched the flash of his pale wrist as he worked his pen across the page. He wrote, “Look at the two symbols. Name them. You see they are the same except that the breath is divided in this one. It is very important to do this perfectly.”

When I tried to divide my breath, he wrote, “The voice must stop here.” He drew a line in the notebook.

I interspersed his instructions with my questions. “What is this dash?” I asked, pointing at the line inside a horseshoe.

“That is throat-sound,” he wrote, “or what we call the voice.”

Buh and Duh had throat-sound while Puh and Tuh had none. It made me think of the river in Pawtucket that ran freely all the way to Slater Mills where it met with wheelpits, sluices, dams and spillways. Throat-sound flowed up from inside you until it was chopped and spliced and segmented by the busy factory of the mouth, departing from your body as words.

Words like purr and curr. I purred, I curred, until his pen attacked the page again. “Take in plenty of air and make the vowel long. You need not shut your mouth when you take in breath. Let the air go in through the mouth and nose.”

Next came curt and pert, Turk and kirk. I tried to feel the symbols exactly in my mouth, matching myself to them. Mr. Bell treated the words as if their purpose was no more than instruction, but I couldn’t help sentences arising in my mind. The Turk was curt but I didn’t know what a kirk was to be pert.

Kirk, I said. Pert.

Good, he said. His pen again: Err, fir, her, fur, turf, earth, firth, Perth, eat, eke.

“Do not put the tongue between the teeth,” he wrote. “Do not sound the voice until the tongue is in the right position. Do not move the tongue till the voice has stopped.”

My tongue went back and forth like a rower at the oars. It tapped the teeth for Earth and stoppered all breath in the throat for Eke like a plug dropped into a sinkhole, releasing it again in a small explosion. Eke, eke.

I wanted to master Visible Speech. I wanted to please Mr. Bell and have Mama and Adeline pleased because of his approval. But I also wanted him to put down the notebook, the indicator, the feather and ivory plug and wander off into conversation again. I waited for those moments when he’d look up from the notebook, a blade of interest slicing along his gaze, and I would smile, knowing that he was about to waver off course.

Now it came. He tapped Perth but when I started to repeat the symbols he held up his finger, and asked, Do you know where Perth is?

I shook my head. And I don’t know what a kirk is, I said.

He fetched a map, which he spread over the table and planted his finger in the middle of Scotland, withdrawing it to reveal the bold lettering of Perth amongst a litter of place names.

I leaned over the map. Perth, I said. And kirk?

A Scottish church, he replied, leaning forward as well. When we have finished our lessons, you will know all about Scotland.

He was close, his shoulders tipped over his homeland. You must miss Scotland, I said but he shrugged. In Brantford, he said, there are Scots everywhere! Some of the towns around there even look like Edinburgh.

I smiled. Edinburgh especially was a generous word to spot on the lips. How long had it been since I’d understood anyone so clearly? Mr. Bell was unlike any teacher I knew. He was so strange and curious with his shabby broadcloth suits, quick movements and bright eyes. I didn’t know where our conversations might turn, and yet I could follow each diversion because he never broke eye contact and knew how to take my understanding with him. There were very few people with that talent. Even in this drab room, with the plain notebooks and chalk dust, it was thrilling.

My mother was happy to return to England, I said, after my father died.

He looked at me, and I wished I could take the words back. But he said, I understand, and added something about his brother. His brother had died, which was why his family had left London, where they had lived after Edinburgh.

I studied his words and tried to summon their shapes again in my mind because I was sure I’d seen Died and didn’t want to take a wrong step on such a topic.

Your brother, I said. I’m sorry.

My brothers. Two brothers. He held up two fingers. My only brothers. They both died of—

But I missed the disease that had taken his brothers, same as I’d missed the plural s. Two brothers, not one. I started to nod but it was no use hiding my confusion from Mr. Bell. The great white plague, he said, repeating himself. Tuberculosis. And he did something he’d never done in our lessons before, spelling the T and B on his fingers.

I was hasty with my condolences for a second time, embarrassed that I’d caused him to spell out the situation so exactingly, even bending his own rules about adhering to speech and notebooks. I thought of his parents, and their concern for his health made sense. He was their sole surviving child.

The air must be much cleaner in Canada, I said. I wanted to add how I’d been sent away from my home too, and that was also in the name of a cure, and everything depended on what Mr. Bell could do with my speech and lip-reading if Mama was to be happy.

He smiled. That is exactly what my mother said! She was right, of course.

He hesitated, as if this was an admission he hadn’t meant to make. He seemed younger and newly uncertain. I smiled at him, and picked up the notebook, thinking to smooth over the moment. The kirks in Perth, I said, are in the firs and turf.

His chin lifted with laughter. Perfect, he said. He took the notebook and added, “In Canada the Scots put maple syrup on their porridge, and that I am very happy with.”

---

Soon Mr. Bell only had to write down the most difficult phrases. The pages of our notebooks became a constellation of words hinting at varied subjects. East Wind, he wrote. Courtesies, Sermons, Physiology. Every night, when I finished my Visible Speech practice, I would turn to these pages and piece our conversations back together. It was like meshing real, tangible words into a net that could be drawn tight on my loneliness at Little St. Clouds. I carried our conversations in my head as I went about Boston. I thought of them as I watched people walking together, their cheeks turned to one another. I didn’t envy them like I might have once done. That was how Mr. Bell and I talked. We were hardly different.

But I was careful writing to Mama and Mary. I didn’t want them to think our lessons wandered away from Visible Speech, or that I had an infatuation. He was my teacher, and several years older, although I didn’t know how many. The Day sisters had other ideas and were merciless gossips, having heard from Adeline about his shabby suits, ill-combed hair and interest in afflicted people. Mr. Bell was the ceaseless word on their lips. They thought nothing was higher than romance, and that I should not be setting my stall too high anyway. To them, Mr. Bell sounded perfect.

I ignored them. I didn’t think any man had confided in the Day sisters like Mr. Bell had with me. I remembered his brothers, and how he had trusted me with his sadness, and I felt a new kind of responsibility.

But I selected some conversations to describe in my letters to Mama, meaning to demonstrate how I was maturing from the girl she had collected from the gates of Miss Roscoe’s school. “His own mother is deaf,” I told her, “so he has seen firsthand our struggles. It is natural that he should see the true use for his father’s Visible Speech symbols.” In another letter, I wrote, “Mr. Bell tells me that he always walks from the train station to his parents’ home, even if it is the middle of the night! It is many hours across the hay fields, but he loves the solitude. Nonetheless he says that the worst thing he can imagine is to feel that solitude in a room full of people.”

I signed off each letter with my name in Visible Speech.

Mary’s replies were rushed and apologetic, having been composed between one baby’s feed and another child’s tantrum. She usually managed to include some strident but hasty, half-spelled-out advice, such as “Remember, a pretty voice isn’t the most useful thing in the world.” She was hauling fruit tubs in Ohio, despite her hopes of escaping rural life in Pawtucket, and I ignored her remarks. Besides, Mama’s letters were full of praise, and more than anything I wanted her to bring good news to Mr. Ackers so that I could join her in London.

“It thrills me,” Mama wrote, “to think of all you are learning. Keep at your lessons thoroughly and you will be with us in London in no time at all. Mr. Bell sounds like a most unusual teacher. Mr. Ackers tells me that he is exceptionally talented at the piano and famous for his declamations of Shakespeare as well. When he was only a boy, he made a speaking automaton! I suppose his father being a philologist gave him the idea.”

I read her letters several times, storing inside of me her praise for whenever my Visible Speech practice felt too exhausting.

I wrote letters to Miss Roscoe and my old friends at the Oral School too. I told them to have hope. The hearing world could be mastered through study. I included easy samples of Visible Speech and gave the English translations and how they could be practiced. I knew Miss Roscoe would pass the letters around the classroom, although she didn’t permit direct letter-writing between her pupils. It was the only contact I could hope for with my old friends.