Helen Keller in Love

by Kristin Cashore

  I wasn’t the Helen Keller they expected, or wanted. But I didn’t care.

  “It was worth it,” I said.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Peter said later that afternoon after the show. I’d wolfed down two hamburgers with him at a burger shack by the hotel—Annie would never let me eat burgers in public: too vulgar, she said. But I couldn’t help it. With Peter I wanted to eat hot dogs, wear high heels, drink gin. “Here’s the problem as I see it,” he said. He’d just paid the lunch bill and was scribbling down the costs for the hotel and the food for our trip back to Boston the next day.

  “You don’t mind how much you take in, and I don’t know enough about your situation to give you advice.” We started across the lawn for the hotel. The sharp scent of pine trees filled the air, and the pine needles underfoot made the ground yield to my shoes. Into the bed of needles the day’s happiness slipped away. “If this keeps up, we’ll be lucky to get back to Wrentham with a few cents.”

  “We’ll work it out,” I said, my face suddenly cool as we walked under the hotel’s covered front porch. That afternoon I napped on my hotel room bed. I slept a deep, dreamless sleep. Night would come, and with it, Peter.

  I had no fear.

  Chapter Seven

  The blind are idolized for the wrong things. It’s strange. The praise I got for being “Helen Keller the miracle.” Everyone loved that. Some people even praised me for becoming a Socialist—a Wobbly, even—supporting the Lawrence strikers, working to wipe out slums in New York City, and rallying against wars around the world. I believed that plutocrat President Taft when, at a speech for the New York Association for the Blind, he asked, “What must the blind think about the Declaration of Independence, since they are not granted the same rights as others in our society?” In my blindness and deafness I proved I was equal—more than equal—in my intellect. But no one, from the time I was a young woman, would accept my having a lover. It was unseemly, somehow, a blind girl in a love affair. Torrid, almost. So I didn’t speak my desire, I hid it. While I marched for birth control, stood up for Margaret Sanger when she gave out leaflets in Brooklyn saying women could limit the number of children they would have, I wasn’t allowed to even marry, or consider having children of my own.

  I couldn’t accept that fate. That wasn’t enough for me.

  In my hotel room after my nap, the air was heavy with rain, and a wind blew in the ripe scent of the nearby town. Down the bare hall outside my room I detected the rapid, determined footsteps of waiters entering the dining room for the dinner shift, sorry to have left their girlfriends or wives. And me? At that moment I wasn’t idolized by anyone. I was a woman alone in a room, with nothing to do, and no one to guide me outside.

  The audience’s applause seemed very far away.

  All afternoon I waited. I read a German Socialist magazine in Braille, restlessly moving my fingers over the raised print, then walked to my window. The slanting, metallic vibrations meant workers were dismantling the Chautauqua tent. A rapid succession of blows followed. The high metal poles that held up the dome of the tent were being knocked down, reminding me of endings.

  The thumps and plunks of the dinner crowd faded; the granite rocks outside my window turned from baking hot to cool. Evening had come, the tour was over. Peter and I would leave the next day for Boston. Surely he would realize that he should come downstairs, read to me, take me to dinner. I felt my way from window to closet, then, with an armful of clothes, tossed them into the open suitcase at the foot of my bed. Still, no Peter.

  The blind are excellent guides. A telltale rap on the ceiling of my room told me Peter was awake; he had swung out of bed and was pacing the bare floors.

  I decided to make a racket to guide him downstairs.

  I sat on my suitcase so I could fasten it tight, then pulled it over to the door and dragged my desk chair, with great banging, away from my desk and sat down heavily. At the oak desk I swept up my hair to show off my bare neck, the way women in romance novels always did, and unbuttoned the top two buttons of my blue dress and sat at my desk just in time. Within minutes Peter came into my room and took my hand.

  “Sorry, boss, I slept through my afternoon shift. Wait a minute.” He leaned over me and saw the Braille letter I had been reading at my desk. “Come to think of it, I’m not sorry at all. Look at you!”

  He took the letter and read to me that a farmer in Indiana, a German American, refused to pay his war bonds, and a mob attacked his house. Hang him! they cried. Traitor! Until his wife convinced them to let him live.

  “You work so much it makes mere humans look bad,” Peter said. I put my hand on his cheek and felt his voice dip.

  “That German farmer needs help.” I was suddenly defensive. I’d thought I could bring Peter closer to me by showing him my intensity. But as I spelled to him he opened and closed his palm, as if he were drawn to me but also pushed away.

  “What’s going on out there?” I jerked my head toward the window to get his attention away from me. The floor beneath my feet vibrated with the arrival of cars and trucks; even the arms of my chair rattled under my hands. “What are all those people coming for?”

  “There’s a carnival outside. Can’t you tell?”

  “How would I know?”

  “I thought you were the scent expert. What, can’t you smell the popcorn? The fireworks, at least?” He was right. There was a singed, burnt scent in the night air. “Let’s go.” He pulled my chair back from the desk. “The carnival awaits. I get the inside seat on the Tilt-A-Whirl. Otherwise I get dizzy as hell. You in?”

  “No.” I held tight to the edge of my desk.

  “Why not?”

  “Do I have to explain?”

  “Explain what?”

  “I can’t just go outside. Look out the window. I’ll bet you dinner at least two photographers are out there, with press tags from the Wisconsin Tribune dangling from their shirt pockets. One man is right outside the hotel, his camera trained on the door.” I felt Peter jolt a bit with surprise. “Most likely the mayor of Appleton is smiling for one of the photographers, and the minute I walk outside, he’ll demand a picture with me.”

  “Great. You’re psychic,” he laughed. “I really am doomed.”

  “Lesson one on the life of Helen Keller.” I tapped his chest with one finger. “Always be prepared. Every public event I go to with Annie, the local newspaper sends a photographer to snap a picture of us with the mayor, or any other dignitary who is there. I guarantee if I go to the fair there will be front-page photos of me in the papers tomorrow.” I felt Peter stand perfectly still, listening to me. “So I have to get ready. Annie insists I always look normal, better than normal if I can pull it off.”

  “I like you the way you are.” He touched my face.

  “Yes, but you’re not the public that pays to hear me speak. I’d go to the fair with you if I could—I’d take the outside seat on the Tilt-A-Whirl and go in the dunking booth, too.”

  “Seriously, Helen. Do you always live for everyone else but yourself? Your public always sees you poised, perfectly smiling, the happy deaf-blind girl. Don’t you ever get tired of the charade?”

  “That’s enough.” I suddenly felt self-conscious, and missed Annie. She would understand.

  Peter acted as if he didn’t hear me. “Come on.” He pulled my chair out and gave my shoulders a shake. “Let’s get outside. Be part of the crowd.” The rumble of the Ferris wheel shook the room, making the air press against me. I still refused to move, and he said, “I get it. Maybe you go only where you’re invited to speak? Be up in the front, where everyone can see you?”

  “That’s a bit harsh.” I stood up straight. He was my employee, after all.

  He took my hand. “Come back here.”

  It was my turn to pull away. No matter how much I argued against being idolized, I was ashamed to hear from him how much my public image meant to me.

  I had learned early to live for others. To say, often, what they w
anted me to say. When I was ten and already well known, my Mastiff dog, Lioness, ran into Tuscumbia’s town square, and a policeman accidentally shot him. I wept. When I wrote about my loss to Mr. William Wade, one of the wealthy men who provided money for my education, he published my letter in Forest and Stream. Thousands of letters arrived in my Tuscumbia mailbox: people around the world wanted to buy me a new dog.

  I was elated. But Annie told me to write back to them and say, “I don’t want another dog. I would like to use your kind offer of money to send a poor little blind and deaf boy named Tommy Stringer to school.” I wrote down Annie’s words in my square handwriting.

  My letter was carried by newspapers across the country.

  My words raised enough money for Tommy to attend Perkins for two full years.

  I was always helpful. Careful. I had learned to show only part of myself to others. Then people would never leave me. I would not be alone in my darkness.

  Ten years later, when I was at Radcliffe College, my composition teacher was one of the first people to tell me to write what I knew—that I had original thoughts. I responded that all my life I had written what I was told, or, at times, what I thought people wanted to hear, but in his class, as a young woman of nineteen, I wanted to express my real thoughts. Because it wasn’t just in my writing that I had lived for others. In newspapers published around the world there were pictures of me meticulously dressed, dancing the fox trot with a young man, but I had never been allowed to date. The world saw me riding a horse on my own, when outside the photo someone always held the reins. The photos were fun, yes. But they were untrue. They did not show my real life.

  Peter leaned over the hotel room desk. The moment of my annoyance with him passed. I suspect it was my bare neck that called to him.

  “I’ve written to my publisher,” I said, “telling them to give the royalties to blinded German soldiers and sailors. We’ve done it!—you and I. Annie would have my head if she knew, but not you. You’re a radical, like me. Together we can even help the Austrian soldiers.”

  He put my hand to his mouth, and ran my fingers gently over his lips. “Don’t you want more than that for yourself? Why shouldn’t you?”

  The pounding of the carnival rides shook the windows of my room as Peter recounted the way I spoke out to audiences in Kansas, in tents in Nebraska, by lakes in rainy Wisconsin over the summer. How the audiences waited to hear about the “miracle” of this deaf-blind woman who speaks her mind.

  I felt as if a light fell over me. His voice flowed through my fingertips.

  “Don’t you ever want other things?” he said.

  I leaned into him.

  “Do you want to hear this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Helen, kiss me.”

  I felt his warm breath on my mouth. “Wait. Not yet.” I fumbled with the little glass figurines on my desktop, suddenly unsure. “Will you—” I moved suddenly toward the door and opened it for him to leave. “Give me some time?” I said, and stumbled over my opened suitcase. When I slipped, Peter steadied me.

  “I’m getting pretty good at this.”

  “Catching me?” I picked up the hem of my floor-length calico dress and swept it free of dust.

  “Keeping you on your own two feet is more like it.” He followed me back into my room.

  “Kiss me.” He pulled me back to him.

  His mouth salt, willow trees, pear.

  I held his face with my hands, his button-down shirt scratchy as he pulled me close. His hands warmed my back.

  “Annie is sick. I have to check on her upstairs.”

  “Right. Another person who needs you.” He stroked my cheek.

  I leaned forward. “We’ll be home soon. When we get there, walk down the hill behind my house to King’s Pond. Meet me there for a swim. I promise you’ll like what you see.”

  He paused, his palm tentative. “Listen. I can barely do the crawl. But if you want me in the water with you, I’m there.”

  I was so relieved that I joked, “If you start drowning I’ll let you sink like a stone.”

  “You’re not my lifeguard?” He felt the smile on my face, and pulled me closer. “Helen, if I start slipping under, I’ll take you down with me.”

  We both laughed.

  Chapter Eight

  Why was I so brazen—so forward with Peter? I was thirty-seven years old and had never before been alone with a man, never mind with a man with a mouth like night. And yet I’d always preferred men’s company to women’s. When I was at Radcliffe, Annie wanted to hire a smart young man to help me with my studies. But Mother immediately stopped her. She’d met with the young man. With his deep brown eyes and lovely Italian hands he was far too handsome to work with me, Mother said. I might be taken with him, and forget about my studies. She ordered him replaced. Now, with Peter near, all that was pent up inside me came alive. I was a rushing train.

  He saw so much—maybe too much—of me.

  I waited, fidgeting, on the hotel’s sweltering front porch the next day. The morning air crackled around me, the ting-ting-ting of the flagpole’s metal reverberated in the breeze, and the scent of motor oil and rubber tires rose from the hotel driveway. I inhaled Peter’s scent of pine soap and coffee as he ran up and down the steps. I knew he was packing the waiting taxi cab with our six trunks.

  Just then the slap of footsteps on the porch made me stand up straight. “Where are our suitcases?” Annie had come out of her room and stood beside me, brushing her fingers against my hand. I inhaled her menthol cough.

  “Peter put them in the cab.”

  “Well, at least he’s learning how to treat women. Not like most men we know.” Her hand was tense in mine, and my heart sank at how sick I felt she was. Then Peter returned for us. He installed Annie in the front seat of the cab. The closing door made a reassuring thump.

  He took my arm.

  “I’m sure you’re a crack navigator.” Peter guided me into the backseat. As he slid in beside me, I was oddly relieved that Annie was in the front.

  I felt the car roar to life.

  “Boston, here we come,” Peter yelled. The cab swerved through town. I rolled down the window. The scent of the bakery, the gas station, and then the camphor scent of the Baptist Church I knew stood at the far edge of town told me we were leaving Wisconsin for good, but then the cab came to a stop. The rumble and bustle of Appleton’s train station moved through my arms and legs.

  “Train station. Time to get out.”

  “Wait a minute. Aren’t we taking the bus?”

  “I checked the schedules. The bus takes seventeen days. Nothing personal, but you’d die of boredom. I can’t spell into your hand for that long and she”—he jerked his head toward Annie—“looks to me like she needs to see a doctor pretty quick.”

  “But you read the paper to me this morning. The local railroad workers are striking for an eight-hour workday. I won’t cross a picket line. We’ll hire a car.”

  “Quiet, lady.” Peter went on, “Annie’s too sick to share the driving. And as far as I can tell you’re not exactly an ace behind the wheel.”

  “You’ve got a point there.” I felt the cold air as he steadied me by the open cab door. Annie slept fitfully in the front seat. I hoped she wouldn’t wake up just yet. I didn’t want her to detect what I was feeling. I wasn’t his idol. I was just Helen. I would follow wherever he led.

  All my life I’ve wanted to fit in. I was the first blind deaf-mute to go to Radcliffe College. I thought I’d make friends with the other girls, but they avoided me in the hallways. They didn’t know the manual fingerspelling language, and I couldn’t speak to them. They gave me a puppy I named Phizz, and nights when the girls were sledding in Boston’s cold with their boyfriends, I sated my hunger for company with Annie, both of us unsure if we’d ever fit in.

  Only one of my professors bothered to learn fingerspelling, and since most of my books weren’t available in Braille, Annie had to spell their contents into my
hand for hours each day. During classes she sat by my side and spelled the lectures word by word to me.

  On those hot summer nights, when the other girls were out past curfew, Annie slept in her room in our apartment on Boston’s Newbury Street. And I pushed away my copies of Cicero in Latin, and Molière in French, and pulled out the romance novel The Last Days of Pompeii. I ran my fingers over the Braille pages about the blind slave girl, hips undulating in the garden, while men picked flowers from her basket. As I read, branches scraped my window. In the night’s heat I felt strangely excited.

  But Annie came into my room and pounced on me: “Caught, discovered, trapped!” She pulled the novel away. If I read books like that, she said, she would not utter one word to me for an entire twenty-four hours. Without Annie spelling into my hand in the Radcliffe classroom, isolation would surround me. I slid the book away.

  Annie needed me to stay childlike.

  But Peter treated me like a woman.

  “Right this way, madam.” He led me deeper into Appleton’s station. Annie followed, her scent like sour rain. As we moved toward our waiting train, he said the walls above the ticket counter were peppered with posters supporting the war in Europe.

  “Don’t get carried away,” Annie spelled as she walked by my side. “Most of the loafers in here are just reading their newspapers, checking their watches, waiting for trains. They don’t care about the war at all. You two can talk antiwar propaganda when we get on the train. As for me, I’m going straight to bed.”

  The trees outside the train station sent sparks of pine scent into the air as Peter led me and Annie up the metal steps, while he repeated the conductor’s shout: “Last caaaaall for Pullman train one seventy-five to Boston.” I felt the metal door slam shut. Peter installed Annie in a sleeper car in front of us, and led me to the club car.

  The train whistle shirred the air as our car moved down the track.