Helen Keller in Love

by Kristin Cashore

  Trucks rumbled past outside as I walked to her room. Inside, the scent of sulfur, quinine, and bitters led me to Annie’s bed. H-e-l-e-n, Annie nervously spelled into my palm as I stood by her bed. A metallic scent rose from her sweating skin; a migraine pierced her temples.

  Outside, wind drove past the pine trees to the road, flowed down East Main Street, and rattled into town.

  “You’re going to be all right, aren’t you?”

  “Do I look all right?” Annie’s voice under my fingers was dry sand.

  Her cough filled the room with its vibrations. Suddenly a rush of cool air. Annie spelled into my hand, “It’s Dr. Webb. It’s about time he showed up; I called him hours ago.” Dr. Webb strode into the room and leaned over Annie’s bed. I put my fingers, gingerly, to his mouth and throat and read his words: his voice felt reedy when, after a few moments, he told Annie, “You’ll go to St. Joseph’s today for a test.”

  I felt the ca-rip of paper as he handed his orders to Annie.

  Is Annie going to die? I thought.

  “This is very dangerous,” Dr. Webb said. “You may not under any circumstances expose others. And if you have it, you’ll go to a sanatorium—”

  “No. I know about these ‘rest cures.’ If you’re lucky you come back in a year.”

  “If you’re lucky you come back. Today. Get the test. It takes weeks to process, so don’t delay.”

  “All right, just to show you that you’re wrong.”

  Even in sickness Annie was defiant. I loved her for that.

  After Dr. Webb left, Annie and I sat together. Time slid by. Finally she said, “This is perfect. I’m sick, my eyesight is going, and now I have to drive to Boston for a TB test. The luck of the Irish, all right.”

  I followed her as she opened her closet door and started to dress.

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “Helen, no.” She patted her hair, and picked up her purse. When I leaned in to kiss her good-bye the onion scent of her breath made me draw back in fear.

  “Who will take care of me while you’re gone?”

  Annie ignored me. She picked up the phone on her bureau and began to dial. I felt the chut-chut-chut of the metal disk turning beneath her fingers. “If tuberculosis doesn’t kill me this will.”

  “What will?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? I’m calling Peter. I can’t leave you here alone, but having him here is no picnic either.”

  Annie taught me the words for colors I could not see. Pink, Annie said when I was a seven-year-old on a rampage for new words, is like “a soft Southern breeze.” Yellow is “like the sun. It means life is rich in promise.” But I can find no color to describe the day I realized Annie might be sent away from me. Her hand in mine as she prepared to leave the room didn’t feel pink or white or even green, as she’d once told me green was “warm and friendly as a new leaf.” No. Her hands gave off the white of death. A husky, graspable thing.

  “Don’t go,” I had said. “Stay.”

  I felt like a cut-down forest tree, rootless.

  Annie was slipping away. I began to feel panic. I write this to explain the contradiction in my thoughts. I wanted to stay by Annie and I wanted to bind Peter to me more closely. Maybe because I was desperate. Yes, I was desperate for Peter.

  “Cheer up,” Annie had said. “The worst is yet to come.” Then she kissed me on both cheeks. The thrum of a cab’s engine moved through me. Annie closed the front door, then Peter opened it.

  He came in.

  Chapter Thirteen

  At times when I trace the pieces of my patchwork quilt I feel their lightness rather than the weight, as if something new is about to reveal itself. The moment Peter stepped over the threshold I knew things would change in ways I could not have predicted.

  “Tell me you don’t need me around here.” Peter draped his tobacco-scented leather bag over a broken wicker chair in my study, pulled out my desk chair with a scrape, and sat down. The farmhouse filled with cool fall air.

  “She looks like she saw a ghost.” Peter laughed about seeing Annie rush down the steps to the car and race off.

  “Maybe she has.” The possibility that Annie had TB filled me with panic. “The doctor was just here. She’s very sick. She’s gone to Boston today for a test …”

  “Hallelujah,” he said. “Not about Annie being sick, but about having a full day alone with you. Looks like we’ve been given a reprieve.”

  “A reprieve? Annie may have TB.” I steadied myself.

  “TB? Big article about it in today’s Globe. Apparently it runs in families,” Peter spelled into my palm. “Ralph Waldo Emerson had it, his wife died of it. Henry David Thoreau died of it at forty-four. Did you know it’s an epidemic in twenty-two states?”

  “Peter, if Annie has it, she’ll …”

  “What? Leave you? Helen, you and Annie exaggerate. Make things worse, or bigger, than they really are.” His hand in mine felt heavy, and we sat without saying a word.

  Had I exaggerated? Suddenly a strange thought seemed to float in the air. Was I exaggerating who Peter was? His shirt cuffs were frayed in my fingers. He was a bohemian. Did he want a steady job? How long would he be my private secretary? He traveled from place to place not really landing anywhere. I got the sense that he loved ideas more than people. Was he attracted to the idea of me? I had the strange sensation the answer was yes. But I pushed the thought away. If Annie was sick, I’d need Peter to take care of me.

  “You two get carried away by things,” Peter repeated. “Annie’s gone to get a test, she’ll be back tonight. I guarantee she’ll be bossing you around again by tomorrow morning. And when the results show up in the mail in what, two weeks? I can’t tell you what’s going to happen. But I can tell you what should happen.”

  “What?” I breathed clean air.

  “You should let me take care of you. Well, as much as any mere human can.” He lightly pinched my waist.

  “You’re right. Maybe it’s nothing.”

  “I didn’t say it’s nothing. TB is serious—I’m not denying that. But you and Annie do jump to conclusions. Then you work yourselves into a frenzy based on what? Speculation, not facts.”

  “Are you chastising me?”

  “I’m saying you need a good journalist. We follow facts, keep things straight.”

  Suddenly I felt very tired.

  “I’ll take care of you.”

  “Are you proposing?” I said.

  “I’m proposing that I’ll take care of you.”

  “Then I accept.”

  To Peter I always said what he needed to hear. I didn’t tell him that fear sliced me like a knife, thinking he’d leave, and with Annie sick I’d have no one near. To myself I told the truth. I didn’t set out to attract his desire. But once it was within my reach I knew I would not let go.

  Peter pulled out my desk chair and led me to it. “Have a seat, lady. Let’s get to work. Isn’t that why you pay me the big bucks?”

  “You’re a tyrant.” I sat at my oak desk, my fingers tracing the familiar white mantel just above it.

  “Yes, but I’m your tyrant,” Peter laughed. “And don’t you forget it.”

  “How could I, with you reminding me every minute of the day?”

  “Quiet, missy.” He put a silver tray with a stack of letters beside me. Ca-riiiip. He opened the first envelope, and a limpid scent of onion, musty tenement rooms rose from the page.

  “London, England,” Peter read: “September 1916.”

  Dear Miss Helen Keller,

  I don’t know where to turn, except to you. They say you’re a saint, pretty as a statue, and kind.

  I blame myself for it. My boy was four. I was afraid. The German blockade of England. No food, we had no food. I held my boy in my arms in the bathroom, dousing his face with water, the acrid smell of garbage filling the alley outside our building. No heat. The air so cold—we couldn’t get warm all winter. But that night he was on fire with it, the fever. It’s my f
ault. I didn’t call the doctor. By morning it was too late. No money, just my cracked hands, this war, and my boy’s cries. My husband bleak. By morning the fever was gone. But he was blind. I still rocked him. Rubbed the white film from his bright blue eyes. He let out a cry—no, a howl like a lost dog—when he tried to stand up and couldn’t see the floor.

  Mrs. John Murray

  I felt a slight movement of air as Peter dropped the letter. Then he said: “Germany fights England, blockades it for months, keeps out even medicines, and this boy goes blind. For what?”

  His anger rose.

  “I know I’m missing something. But remind me, Helen. What is this war for?”

  We sat together not speaking.

  Finally I said, “We’ll send the mother a check. Annie and I send money to people like this every day.”

  “For what? To help this one woman, yes. But that won’t stop the problem.”

  “Then we’ll send money to the British League for Blind Children.” I handed Peter the letter; a slight shudder told me he opened the file drawer to drop the letter in.

  “Damn these selfish capitalists. They just want to wage war. Don’t you get it, Helen? Don’t you see how one donation won’t really help this boy?”

  It took Peter a minute to realize I wasn’t going to say anything.

  I kept silent about the hundreds of checks Annie and I sent out every month, every year, to people who pulled us aside on trains, in the streets, in hotel lobbies after our talks, saying they needed money for someone they loved who’d lost their sight, the truth was we sent money all over the place. Even when we didn’t have enough for ourselves.

  “Poor kid,” he said finally. “What he’s going to suffer.”

  “Poor mother,” I said right back.

  Mother, mother. The image of my own mother—even then on a train heading north—came to mind. But I tried to banish it. I can’t think about her because when I do it is like thinking of a long night. A cool night, at times. At times light with a breeze. But underneath, thunder clouds and the threat, always, of a storm.

  I can’t remember losing my eyesight, or my hearing. That was my good fortune—to forget those days and nights of fever, of pain. But Mother? She remembered it all. It was seared into her, made one with her flesh: the minute she passed her hand over my eyes and I did not blink she said to herself, “It is finished.” A kind of dusk fell around her, too. Sometimes, with the birth of her two other children—my sister, Mildred; my brother, Phillips Brooks—or on her travels with Annie and me across the country, that dusk would lift. But most of her life was lived in a shadow of grief that she couldn’t save me. The intolerable, blurred image of what I could have been.

  “Hold your horses.” Peter’s hand in mine brought me back. “This just may be the ticket.” Peter placed another letter in my hands.

  “What is this?”

  “A way to help. You’re invited to address an antiwar rally in downtown Boston. A few weeks from today. They say they want the world-renowned Helen Keller to inspire the crowds, help keep the U.S. out of this damned war.”

  “I’ll do it.”

  “Not so fast. If you’re so world renowned, why do they want you to speak for free?”

  “I’m sure it’s not for free. They must be offering an honorarium?”

  I felt a slight vibration as Peter shook the letter and read on: “Twenty dollars! That’s not even horse feed.”

  “They don’t need to pay me. They need to raise money to stop the war.”

  “At last count, Helen, you have six outbuildings that need roofing, a lawn that’s going to seed, and Annie’s treatment, if she needs it, won’t be free. Now where will you get the money for that?”

  “I …”

  “By the way,” Peter went on. “Your mother gets here tomorrow. Who paid for her train ticket?”

  “Annie and I …”

  “And when she gets here, who pays for her food?” Peter fingered the silky dress I wore. “If she’s anything like you and Annie Sullivan—two women who appear to have a severe allergy to anything on sale—who will pay for her trips to Newbury Street for the perfect new shawl?”

  “She’s my mother. She needs me.”

  “That sounds strangely familiar.” He traced my jaw so softly. “Tell me, Helen, who doesn’t?”

  “I’m sorry.” His criticism of me seemed like a small betrayal. Did he think I forgot that I needed money coming in? The cost of Annie’s test and treatment suddenly flooded through me.

  “Seems like you’re always apologizing.” He traced my upper lip with his fingers. “But then you go ahead and do whatever you want, anyway.”

  I can’t remember a time when Mother didn’t need my help. She needed me to ease her guilt, her sorrow. When I was almost twelve years old, Annie and I traveled to Tuscumbia in June to find my father very low on money—almost bankrupt. Everything he owned was mortgaged. My baby brother, Phillips, had whooping cough, and my half-brother, James, had what seemed to be typhoid fever. Exhausted, Mother cared for them. She had no nurse, no cook. Annie loaned my father thirty-five dollars of her own, and thirty-five of mine, too, so heavily was he in debt.

  My father threatened to have me become part of a freak show, to be an exhibit: people would flock to see the blind, deaf, mute girl talk with her hands.

  “They’ll pay me five hundred dollars a week,” he yelled. The air in our Tuscumbia house so thick it felt like wool around me, so heavy I could not remove it from my eyes, my mouth. My great-great-grandfather had a claim to thousands of acres of Alabama land, Robert E. Lee was a second cousin to my grandmother; my father was a Confederate Army captain—but after the Civil War his title was about all he had left. Finally, Mother snapped at my father, “You’ll never use her to support us.” But the message was clear: She would fight for me, yes. But the need to make my own life was up to me.

  So I told Peter I had to go to Boston Common, I had to be on the podium, in front of the crowd, but I didn’t tell him why. That since an early age I’ve needed a crowd to let me know I have a reason for being. The warmth of their applause slowing, for a moment, the sorrow I, too, carry inside me.

  So I turned to him and said, “I have to go. And I’ll need you with me.”

  He hesitated.

  “Look. I’ll split the twenty-dollar honorarium.”

  “You’re too generous,” Peter said.

  “It will pay for our train ride—round-trip.”

  “And two martinis,” he laughed. “Okay. Boston Common, here we come.” Peter pushed the pile of letters away. “Now, missy, Annie will be back in a few hours and your mother gets here tomorrow, so let’s attend to some more important business right now.”

  We had the whole morning together. And I got hungry. A wild growling in my stomach. Together we walked the hall to the kitchen and had toast slathered with jelly, huge glasses of milk, and a bowl of porridge that I made myself.

  Then by the kitchen table, the whole kitchen filled with the scent of ripe peaches, he pulled me close to him until I was breathless, and he said, “Can I see the ripe, bawdy Helen?” With one hand he reached behind me to close the kitchen curtains, then slid a date into my mouth; I bit it, then slid it between his teeth.

  His mouth tasted like the earth’s deep dark.

  Then he lifted up my blouse.

  “I’ll put up with your mother. I’ll help you take care of Annie. I’ll even go to the rally with you and take my fee in cold hard cash because it’s my job. But pleasure?” He put his fingers on my blouse, and unbuttoned the top button.

  “That’s free.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  I’ve written twelve books about my blindness, and in them I said I was an optimist, fully alive since the day in college when I’d read Descartes’s “I think, therefore, I am,” and decided I could use my intellect to overcome any obstacles in my way. I wanted for nothing. I was as capable as any sighted or hearing person. Yet I never said how much I yearned for that which
came so easily to others: the ability to love a man, to have a child. Those things would never come freely to me. So a fury raged in me. I became a burnt fuse inside, nothing but ash. I had to learn to act as though parts of myself simply did not exist.

  But Peter made those cravings burn again.

  So as heat rose inside the kitchen and the windows let in the bitter scent of dried grass, I let Peter reach for me. In the scorching heat of the day he touched me. It was heart-stopping. Peter’s hands held firmly to my waist, and as if we had all the time in the world, I leaned into him again, while the kitchen’s air grew warmer around us. Outside in the early afternoon the mail truck rounded the bend in the road, and was gone, leaving us alone, with no one around for miles.

  Peter eased my blouse from my shoulders.

  “You need some tutoring.” He led me across the rough kitchen floor to the divan in the front hall.

  “And you’re my teacher, I suppose?” I slid back onto the divan. “May I take your advanced class?”

  “You’re in. And thank God Annie’s gone till at least five.”

  “I won’t thank God she’s sick,” I said. “But the way your hands feel on me are a blessing indeed.”

  “Don’t get all serious on me.” He guided my hands under his shirt.

  I inhaled sharply as he lowered himself to my ribs.

  “Your body is like a temple.” He traced my skin with his mouth.

  Suddenly he pulled away. “Damn, she has good timing.”

  “Who?”

  “Your real teacher.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She’s here.”

  “Are you sure?” I buttoned my blouse, fingers flying. The air grew heavy in the front hallway. Only then, with Peter’s body away from mine, did I sense Annie’s car shuddering into the driveway beyond the maple trees. It seems strange to me even now how calm I felt, as if nothing could go wrong.

  “Come on. Her car’s in the driveway. Now up you go, missy.”

  I felt a rat-a-tat-tat vibration as Peter opened the shutters over the hall window and then shut them again. “Damn. It’s Annie, all right.” We both willed ourselves to sit apart, to straighten our clothes. There was a pause and then Peter said, “When’s the last time she repaired that car? It’s dinged up on the fender.” Then he stopped. “Oh, that would be—”