Helen Keller in Love

by Kristin Cashore

  As I slid into a leather seat by the window, Peter passed a packet of letters to me. I felt his hand as he plied open a bulging envelope. “Your latest bills, I think.”

  “Let’s get through these as quick as we can.” I drummed my fingers on the table. “And then it’s time for lunch and a drink.”

  “Yes, boss.” He covered my fingers with his. “The sooner we finish these the better.”

  Roof repair: $1,750.00 Payment thirty days overdue

  Painting: $900.00 Payment due immediately

  Taxes: $1,400.00 Unpaid. Penalty due

  “Helen.” He took my hand. “You and Annie run a bit of an unsteady ship.”

  The train rocked so unevenly that I held the table’s edge. “You’ve been with us one full week already, and you’re just realizing that?”

  “Well, I am a quick study.” He steadied me with his hand.

  I breathed easier. “I’m suddenly thirsty.” The passageway thudded with the tread of other passengers lining up at the far end of the car for lunch. “Will you get us some drinks?” I could smell the coffee, the tang of whiskey sours in the club car. “And some lunch?” I pushed him toward the edge of our seat. “Let’s put these away for now.” I slid the envelope of bills back toward him.

  “Your wish is my command. If you want to deny you have problems, I’m with you. When I come back with lunch we’ll talk about what will happen during our Wrentham swim, instead.” He moved away, leaving behind a pocket of air. He would soon realize the extent of the trouble Annie and I were in. But I pushed that thought out of my mind and thought about his return instead.

  I learned denial early. At age seventeen, I first felt sexual desire; it was while I was reading a romance novel. Then one morning I asked Annie about sex and she said, “Forget it. That’s not for you. Channel it into your work.” And I did. Fifteen cities in two months and I earned enough money for our house, clothes, and food. My very life depended on my never seeming different from those in the sighted world. My motto, according to Annie, was simple: never complain. So as the train shook furiously over the cross-country tracks, and I felt Peter approaching, I did what anyone good at denial would do. I picked up my paper napkin, and spread it over my lap.

  I was ready for a hearty lunch. Peter handed me a lunch bag. I pulled it open, plucked out a ham sandwich, with its scent of salt and the smokehouse, and bit in. I was famished. “Read me the news?” I pushed the newspaper toward him.

  While munching on his grilled cheese sandwich, Peter rattled the New York Times from where it had fallen to the floor. He shook it open to an article on the war wounded and read. “Listen to this. There’s this medical officer—Charles Meyers—who’s coined a new diagnosis. It’s called shell shock. It happens when soldiers—kids, really—see and hear too much death and they lose their minds. Some even become blind and mute. One seventeen-year-old in the trenches in the Battle of the Somme saw a shell explode fifty feet away; he was unconscious for days. When he woke up his hands and feet shook uncontrollably. The doctors found nothing physically wrong. Still, he was blind and mute.”

  “Like me.”

  “Not exactly.” Peter’s voice moved faster as he read. I kept my fingers close to his mouth to keep up. “This kind of blindness, or muteness, is all in the mind. According to the paper, two thousand seventeen men were sent to one British hospital for shell shock.”

  “Peter.” I turned and ran my fingers over the taut skin of his cheekbones. “Why don’t you write an article about that? I can just see it in the New York Times. ‘Special Report from Peter Fagan, Correspondent.’” I picked up my napkin, wiped my mouth, and hoped there were no crumbs.

  Peter leaned toward me. “You’re a mess, missy.” He deftly brushed the rest of the crumbs from my blouse. I wished I had made more of a mess.

  “Sure, I can write a piece on shell shock, but the Times will never take it. I’m just a former stringer for the Boston Herald, remember? Now let me clean off the rest of your pretty dress.”

  “Stop that. Eat your lunch. Keep your hands off me.” I laughed. “They’ll take it if I ask them. I wrote for them. They’ll take it if I say so. We’ll be a team. We’ll make the money we need.”

  “What do you mean, ‘we’? I’m just your secretary while Annie’s too sick to work. If you don’t mind my being so bold, it looks like the burden is on you. You’re the one who’s world famous.”

  He ran his fingers over my cheek. “I love that you’re an independent woman.” He lit a cigarette, the tobacco ripe and tart.

  I nodded, my jaw tensed.

  “Isn’t it something?” What I didn’t tell him is that I’m more dependent than he thinks. There are some things about which I keep mute. Because I have no intention of losing this man.

  “Wait.” I stopped Peter from reading more. “I think I’ve heard enough for one day.”

  Peter let the paper slide from his hands.

  For the first time, we sat together without anything to say.

  I leaned back in my seat and breathed in the hot air, the singed ash from the train, the acres of barley, wheat, and corn fields as we passed. And I daydreamed that Peter peeled back my dress. I arched up to him and we tossed and rolled together in a world without end. Through the night, the train-fast night.

  Chapter Nine

  In that way Peter brought alive cravings in me, like an empty mouth. To be with someone who didn’t idolize me. Who saw me as a grown woman who wanted a life of her own, instead. But I didn’t know about the cravings I brought alive in him. Some were for fame. Others for some kind of power. All were contradictions. None of them really were clear. I told Peter none of this.

  Instead I betrayed my loyalty to Annie—I should have been by her side in her sleeping car; she was so sick. But no. I followed Peter, eagerly, into the club car just to sit by him that first day on the train, and the next day, and the next. I stayed by his side all the way home to Boston, then out to Wrentham, where we installed Annie in her second-floor bedroom, then we went outside, to be alone in the night air. The hot-tar scent of the street and the smoky traces of a nearby barbecue wafted toward me on the breeze. I slid my fingers into Peter’s open palm when he said, “Massachusetts has a hurricane season?”

  “We never have hurricanes here.” I paused, smiling at what I knew would come next.

  “Not by the looks of this place.” I felt him move his head back and forth, taking in the disheveled state of my house. “What on earth happened here?”

  Through the windows opening onto the porch, I knew he saw the living room lit by a lamp. There, two ragged chairs that felt like oats, rough to the touch, faced each other in front of the enormous fireplace, a rickety table between, a Braille Monopoly game, newspapers, old books scattered across other tables and the floor, and wisps of dog hair from my Great Dane, Thora, clung to the ragged braided rug. “John used to help us keep things up. But it’s hard now that he’s gone.”

  Peter said nothing at first, at the mention of John. Annie’s husband, a ne’er-do-well who walked out on her two years ago, was Peter’s boss at the Boston Herald. An odd tension made him close his hand into a fist. “I know he’s your boss,” I said. “I’m not criticizing. But when he and Annie were married and he lived here, he did the odd jobs—built bookcases, put in the screens for summer. He even stretched a wire a half-mile long across the stone wall in the woods so I could walk alone. But now that he’s gone, well …” I faltered.

  “I hardly know the man.” Peter stretched his fingers and traced my palm. “Besides, he was my boss. You’re the boss now. In fact I’m taking the train into Boston tonight to pack up my apartment. Annie rented me a house nearby so I can be at your beck and call from now on.”

  “And don’t you forget it.” I was so relieved and excited that he would be near that I didn’t even mind if he noticed the living room ceiling: after a storm, while Annie and I were away on a lecture tour last year, great patches of water leaked over two-thirds of the ceiling, l
eaving it a sodden, dark, tea-colored brown. She had fingerspelled the disaster into my hand.

  “Here’s what I don’t understand,” Peter said. “It’s you and Annie, traveling the country to paltry audiences this year, as far as I can see, yet you’ve got this house, and me, and if I’m not mistaken there’s a servant inside lighting the lamps and primping himself, eager to see you the minute we walk in.”

  “And?” I was ready to be more honest than I should have been. “You want to know how I manage this? How a deaf, blind woman in 1916 can afford her own house?”

  “Something like that, yes.” He smelled of clover and fresh-cut grass. I would have said anything.

  “This house cost me my life,” I said.

  “What?”

  “You know.” I waited. “The book …”

  “Oh, The Story of My Life.”

  “Paid for it,” I exhaled. My autobiography had been published to critical acclaim when I was only in my twenties.

  “Looks like you bought this place in the halcyon days.” I felt his fingers peeling the decayed paint from the windowsill. “Spent money you couldn’t afford. But that’s not the strangest part. Let me get this straight. You wrote the story of your life when you were what, twenty-five?”

  “Don’t age me.” I gave him a poke. “I was twenty-two.”

  “Tell us all about yourself,” people urged. So I wrote The Story of My Life when I was a college student. The tale I told in my autobiography was one of utter triumph: of how Annie, then the Perkins School for the Blind, then Radcliffe, all carried me closer to the shores of the normal, sighted and hearing world. Books were my dearest friends, I wrote, making up for the lack of human company. But for all the success of that book, underneath there were so many things I never said. A dark jealousy burned. I tried so hard, in my writing and my books, to seem exactly like a normal, hearing and sighted person that I never showed how discouraged or disappointed I was at times. I wanted to show perfection.

  Later in life I wrote, “What I have printed gives no knowledge of my actual life.” Strangers, the people closest to me, no one liked hearing that.

  I felt Peter pivot so my hands moved from his chest to his back. “Okay,” he said. “You’ve got twenty-four acres, some outbuildings that seem to be sinking into the earth—”

  “They’re not that bad,” I interrupted.

  “Well, the roof needs repair, even the lawn needs mowing. But this place really is something,” he tapped into my palm. I felt his fingers spell I’ll see you tomorrow. “No offense,” he added, “but I hope Annie needs a long mending period before she takes over again. I’m beginning to like this job.”

  “I’m beginning to like being the boss.”

  “Have I told you how much I like a woman in charge?” He pinched my lower back hard, sending a jolt to my skin. “Do that again,” I said. “And you’re employee of the month.”

  Pain is a dark star in my life. It’s always been with me. Even now, thirty-five years after I lost my hearing and sight, I still remember the burning, like a fireplace poker turned around behind my eyes, at nineteen months old when my fever broke, and I was going blind. Day by day, the sunlight pierced my eyes like fire. Slowly my sight burned to ash. Nothing left. My fingers still ache with the felt memory of how fiercely I rubbed my infant eyes of pain.

  And my blue eyes? The ones you see in my photographs? So bright and clear that reporters say they are mesmerized by my gaze? They’re glass. I had them put in during an operation when I was a young woman so that I could look more normal, less blind.

  But no pain is like the one I had when I went to Annie’s room our first night back in Wrentham and realized she knew I wanted Peter near me, and that she had made plans to send him away.

  The truth is that it was Annie alone who really knew me. She read my moods instantly. With a touch or by a look I was exposed to her, like a child. After Peter left for the night I walked carefully inside the house and, touching the hall table, then the velvet loveseat by the far wall of the entryway, found my way to her room. Slowly, I went in.

  The queer aluminum scent told me that Annie sat up, alert in bed, and the shrill pock of her fingers in mine once I crossed the thick-rugged floor to greet her was like an electric shock. With great force Annie threw back her quilt and told me to sit down. She must have run her eyes over me—the top buttons open on my dress, the heat in my face from being with Peter—because she said, “Sit down, now. You look like a chicken about to be plucked.”

  “Don’t you mean a flower?” I idly picked up the bristle brush on her bedside table and started brushing her hair. “Your hair’s so tangled it’s like a pelt.” She bowed her head. I tugged the brush through the knots.

  “Animals have pelts, Helen. Not humans.” She kept wanting to teach me, even though I was no longer a child.

  “You’re curled up like an animal, a hurt one, in bed,” I spelled. Her bathrobe was matted beneath my fingers when I touched her sleeve; the breakfast tray on her bedside table gave off the odor of untouched eggs and cold coffee.

  “Careful or I’ll bite.” Annie made a snapping motion with her mouth, and I was so thankful she forgot about Peter that I laughed.

  “Do that again.” I held her to me.

  She leaned back so I could brush more. Her shoulders, thick with muscle, weight, and worry, sank beneath the even strokes of the brush. Gradually, her breathing slowed.

  The familiar scent of just we two together made the thought of Peter fade away.

  Vaguely, then more strongly, a childhood memory came to me. I am seven years old, sitting at Annie’s knee in my bedroom in Tuscumbia, Alabama. Annie is filled with nervous energy: it is my first Christmas since she arrived. Annie, in order to tame me, had taken me from the house where I lived with my mother and father, and moved us into a two-room house, where just she and I lived. Every day she taught me words; every night I slept, a child, by her side. She was nineteen, an orphan. And that Christmas day she wrote a letter to her former teacher—a Braille letter I later read. In it Annie crowed to her friend, “With Helen, I have found someone who will love me completely—and can never leave.” And I never wanted to leave her, until Peter.

  Annie sat up, took the brush from my hand, and said in the eerie way she had of reading my mind: “You were to be with me on the train. Instead you were alone with him—Helen, after everything I said, you’ve disobeyed?”

  Before I could protest she said, “It’s done. I’ve sent for your mother. She’s already left Alabama by train; she’ll be here in a week. She’ll stay with you, every minute of the day, mother hawk that she is, until I’m better.”

  “You sent for Mother? From Alabama? Without talking to me first?” I turned my head toward the window; a steady shake-shake of the floorboards told me the Boston-bound train thudded through the far woods. Peter was on that train, due to return the next day to Wrentham and the house Annie had rented for him, to be close to me. Every cell of me filled with anticipation, hummed with it until the train rushed over the slight hill behind our house.

  “I thought you rented a house so he could be near.” I steadied myself by holding her bedpost.

  Annie’s hand was sweating and silent in mine.

  “I changed my mind.” She turned to lie back again, exhausted. “Too many things are changing around here, Helen. When your mother gets here everything will go back to normal.” Annie struggled to sit up. “When Peter gets here tomorrow I’m telling him I’m back in charge. He has to stay away.”

  But even as I touched her soft hair, my fingers filled with love for her, I wanted to tell her the truth: Before Mother arrives, I will make my move. Nothing will stay as it is.

  Chapter Ten

  In the books I’ve written about my life I never told the whole truth. Once Peter and I came back to my rattletrap farmhouse outside of Boston everything changed for me. I know I wrote about how Peter and I had a “little isle of joy” in our love together, but I don’t think—no, I know�
�I never wrote that I did it this way: I betrayed, cut off, lied to, people I loved.

  Here’s another thing I never wrote in all those books: I would do it again.

  It was the second day we were back. The heat was sweltering. King’s Pond gave off the scent of wet acorns and oak leaves as Peter pulled me toward the wooden cabin set in a grove of pines by the shore. “Come with me. For a minute.” The ground gave way in soft pockets under my shoes as he led me toward the cabin. I stumbled over the rocky path, the damp air of the woods around us. Peter pulled open the cabin door and the musty odor of bathing suits and picnic baskets reminded me of summers on King’s Pond.

  “We’ll tell Annie—and your mother when she gets here. Just not yet,” Peter said.

  “But when? We can’t hide out here all day. The second Annie sees you she’ll have you driven to the train.”

  “More like she’ll have me shot.” Peter laughed. “I saw her myself at breakfast. If looks could kill, you’d be digging my grave right now.”

  “And get this dress dirty?” I picked up the hem of my favorite sassy blue dress. “Sorry, but you’d have to call the undertaker yourself.”

  “Your concern is touching. Still, we have to tell her.”

  “Tell her what, exactly?” I cocked my head. That morning over a hurried breakfast of oatmeal and blueberries in our kitchen, Peter dabbed at bits of blueberry staining my mouth as I told him Annie wanted to replace him.

  “We’ll tell Annie that I’m staying put. The rental house is mine, I’m your private secretary, and that’s that.”

  “And that’s because … ?”

  “That’s because we’re …” Peter stopped.

  “We’re what?” I was still a post-Victorian woman. No matter how much the people Annie and I knew preached free love, I still couldn’t claim a man as my own.

  “We’re …” Still he waited.

  “Comrades? I do have a Bolshevik flag hanging in my bedroom.”