Helen Keller in Love

by Kristin Cashore

  “It was nothing. A poke in the arm and I was done. A whole day wasted.”

  “Today wasn’t wasted …”

  “You’re right, Helen. Today wasn’t wasted. I left the house at six a.m. with my chest feeling like it was on fire, and I came home five hours later with my ears about to burst: your mother talked nonstop from the time I picked her up at South Station until the minute we came up the driveway, and where were you? Were you here to listen to her torrent of words about Mildred, and the new baby Katherine—”

  “Is Mother okay?”

  “And Mildred’s most excellent mincemeat pies, how Mildred is the best housekeeper in Montgomery, and the Junior League just can’t function without her. I swear, Helen, you know I love her, but then we come in here, practically kicking our way through the books and parcels scattered in the front hall, there’s no food for dinner, I have to turn around and go back out to grocery shop and you—the reason she came here—you are nowhere to be found.”

  Too delirious to answer, I just laughed.

  “It’s not funny.” Annie whacked me with a rolled-up newspaper. “You couldn’t have cleaned up?”

  “I should have, you’re right.” I smiled—it was so absurd.

  “So? Where were you?”

  “Oh, out walking.” I smoothed my dress, one button still open.

  “It’s pouring, Helen.” I felt Annie step away from me, examining me from head to foot. She patted my dress.

  “You’re soaking wet.” She came closer and sniffed my collar, my neck, my hair. “And you reek of cigarette smoke.”

  I was determined to keep my secret about Peter to myself. I couldn’t give Annie the chance to stop me, to end this happiness.

  A great silence fell over the room.

  “Peter loves his vices, doesn’t he? Have you become the newest of them?”

  I wanted to say, “I am engaged. I am to be married—Peter and I, we’re going to run away.” But again I lied.

  “I was in the barn.”

  “In the barn?”

  “Ian, the boy who cuts the lawn, he was smoking out there.”

  “And you? What were you doing? Reading those trashy romance novels you hide in that rusted metal bin?”

  “Guilty.” I smiled. “What’s my punishment?”

  Annie laughed and poked me on the arm. Then she unpacked the rest of the groceries while I followed her around the kitchen as if nothing at all had happened.

  The blanketed air in the room told me Annie was still angry, so I pulled her toward the kitchen table and spelled, “You’re tired. Please, sit down. Read, have some tea, relax.” I gave her the newspaper. To my relief she took it and settled into a chair beside me.

  “Oh, this is classic,” Annie said moments later. “Another big shot idealizing the blind.”

  “What?” A car rushed by outside. I felt it through the floor as I held her hand.

  “Here, in the paper.” She shook out the newspaper, its wet scent rising to me. “They’re quoting this Indian swami. A temple in his name is being built in Boston. According to this article, a blind person asked the swami if there’s anything worse than losing one’s eyesight. The swami replied: ‘Yes, losing your vision!’”

  “Who said that?”

  “Swami Vivekananda. Born in India in 1863, died in 1902, believed we are all one. Traveled the world saying so. He’s one of your type: he’s met with everyone—Harvard professors, the common man, heads of universities from here to Kingdom Come.”

  “Well, he’s right. Peter has a vision,” I spelled to Annie. “He thinks everyone—even people left out of the system—should take their place in the world.”

  “Peter sees what he wants to see.” Annie’s hand turned harder in mine. “Helen, have you even noticed that we’re using only half the kitchen table this morning? Do you have any idea why? It’s because your Mr. Vision, as you call him, is too busy idling about to help keep this house going—and don’t tell me he’s too good for that work. We all pitch in here. Here, feel this.” She laid my hand on a stack of books that were spread out over the table’s entire right side. “Recognize these?”

  “My Braille books,” I said.

  “Right. I asked Peter to take them down and clear out the bookcase. It’s dusty, and we always clean it this time of year. So what did he do? He pulled down all your books—and you know together they weigh tons—and left them piled here for two days. He’s too busy dreaming up schemes to improve conditions for the women of the Lawrence Mills than to help the ones right here in this home.”

  “You could have asked me.”

  “When you do housework it’s like a tornado has gone through the room. And Peter doesn’t have a practical bone in his body,” Annie spelled, her fingers staccato in mine. “You need someone to buy sugar and milk every week, to set up your next speaking engagements, to get you there and back, and to make sure there’s food to eat when you get home again. Not to mention holding reporters at bay, and tracking the finances to keep this whole ship steady.”

  At that moment, I was so elated about Peter wanting to marry me that I refused to see anything else. I didn’t think about how we’d secretly marry or, once married, how we would work out the details of our life together. All I could do was run my hands over my Braille books, sure that we would find a solution.

  “Peter possibly may have a vision.” Annie shoved the books to the corner, and the floor vibrated beneath my feet as she dragged a stepladder to the bookshelf. A shudder told me she climbed up, re-positioned the heavy volumes, and came back down. “But God knows both of you can’t be blind.”

  Annie was not finished, not by a long shot. She was strangely attracted to what she suspected was happening between me and Peter. Even as I got up and walked to the dining room to set the table for dinner, feeling my way around it, one hand on the edge as a guide, the other placing napkins to the left of three plates—for Annie, Mother, and myself—Annie followed me, eager to talk. With a strange unease to her fingers she tapped, “I asked around about your Mr. Fagan today.”

  “What?” I stopped and fiddled with the edge of a plate.

  “In Boston. I stopped by the Herald—”

  “Was John there?”

  “Yes, well, no. Not for long, but I—”

  “You saw him? Annie?”

  “I …” Annie held up her hands. I imagined tuberculosis floating like bits of ash in her lungs. She was afraid. She wanted John back. But by the limp feeling in her hand I knew he had no intention of coming to Wrentham again. “Mr. Fagan’s a new hire, not much experience. Helen, are you listening?”

  “Yes.” I’d finished setting the table and collapsed on a chair by the fireplace, unsure what Annie would say next.

  “He’s engaged.”

  “Oh, he’s engaged, all right.”

  “He’s engaged to a Miss Dorothy Eagan.”

  “No, he’s not.”

  “I have John’s word on this.”

  “That couldn’t be true.”

  “At least I know this: he’ll stay away from you.”

  I knew John would say anything to hurt Annie and me. I never doubted that he had lied about Peter. But how fine, how really liberating, that Annie now thought she didn’t have to worry. As we waited for my mother to come to dinner I thought I was almost free.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Some people smell of fire. My mother swept into the dining room and the afternoon stood still. I inhaled her and remembered when I was four: the smell of floor wax, lard from the huge iron pots hanging over the kitchen fireplace, and the churned butter as my mother worked alongside the Negro servants, all the while me clinging to her skirts.

  “You two need a little time alone,” Annie spelled into my palm. “I’m going to put dinner on.” Then she spelled only to me, “For God’s sake, Helen. Behave yourself while I’m gone.”

  She started to cough, that ratcheting mixing with the vibration of her shoes as she left the room.

  Moth
er never liked talking about difficulties. Even with the scent of Annie’s menthol cough drops permeating the room, Mother didn’t mention tuberculosis, or the fact that if Annie died, the only person left to take care of me would be Mother herself. So, as the curtains billowed, filling the room with hot, damp air, Mother moved her fingers in mine as if counting. Her hand was not rough and sinewy, like Peter’s, nor increasingly wan, like Annie’s, but softer, more yielding, scented of the ferns, yellow roses, and ivy that surrounded her Alabama house.

  Still, her wedding ring parted my right thumb from my fingers, as if she specialized in taking things apart.

  “How long has it been, Helen?”

  “How long has what been? Annie’s test? Two, three days.”

  “No. How many years has it been since Annie came to us?”

  “I was seven, so thirty years.”

  “And she’s still as … tempestuous as ever?”

  “You mean moody? Yes.”

  “That’s amazing.”

  “What?”

  “Not that she came—she needed work; we needed a teacher. It’s only amazing that she stayed.”

  I was so anxious to keep Mother’s mind off of Peter and me that I brought up one of her favorite stories.

  “You said Annie looked like a ragamuffin when she got off the Boston-Tuscumbia train. The cinders had made her eyes swell, and she lost a shoe in Baltimore so she came limping off the train, one eye squinted shut, and you thought, ‘This is the teacher Perkins sent us? This is the valedictorian of the 1886 graduating class?’”

  “That whole first year she fought every night with your father over dinner about how the Yankees won the Civil War, and she was so furious at your father’s insistence that the South deserved to win that I can’t tell you how many times she packed her bags to leave.” Mother laughed.

  “And I was terrorizing the dining room.”

  “Helen. You were never that bad.”

  “You’re right. I was worse.”

  My mother never wanted me to tell the truth. But at the age of seven when Annie arrived in Tuscumbia my shoelaces were strings, my hair a knotted mass, my voice a bitter rage when anyone tried to rule me. When I wrote these things in my autobiography, my mother said it made her look unfit.

  How could I know the dark hallways my mother paced, alone, searching for a way to help me? How at night, unmasked, she felt helpless, terrified, at having to raise me, wondering what would happen to me if she died. How both jealous and proud she felt when Annie civilized me.

  The savory smell of pot roast and potatoes from the kitchen told me Annie was hard at work. “Still,” Mother continued, “I’ve never gotten used to you and Annie talking to each other and my not knowing what you’re saying.”

  “You mean what Annie just said to me?” I stalled.

  She waited.

  “We said you never looked better.” How easily I lied.

  “And you look quite … robust.” I felt her move back to inspect me. “You’ve been outdoors quite a bit?”

  “Swimming, biking.” I bit my lip.

  “You’ve taken up exercise.”

  “I’ve taken up some new habits, yes.”

  “They suit you. You’ve never looked more radiant. But Annie looks pale.”

  “Oh, you know, we’re busy.”

  “Perhaps Annie has been too busy.” She paused.

  “Too busy for what?” I fiddled with my teacup.

  “To stay home, to take care of herself.”

  “Mother. You know we have to work.” I stopped.

  There was a long pause.

  “Yes, the Keller trust fund didn’t exactly work out, did it?”

  I felt the narrow wedding band on her finger. Mother never spoke of the sweltering Alabama summers when she took Annie and me with her and Father to our retreat house high in the mountains. That house surrounded by pine forests, the tinny scent of red fox, and the dark-cave scent of bear. Annie, Mother, and I sat on the veranda, hungry because there was so little to eat in the house, while my father stalked the woods hunting with his friends. One day he plunked up the veranda steps to pack his bag and return to Tuscumbia, leaving us three in the woods with no money and no way home.

  When I wrote about this in one of my books Mother said I brought the family shame.

  Now I spoke up and told the truth. I wanted a changed life. I was not afraid. The dining room air shook ever so slightly with Annie’s cough as she rattled the plates in the kitchen.

  “All the work’s taken a toll on Annie.”

  “Mother, you can’t think that our travels made her sick.”

  “I have never been able to tell you what to do.” Mother laughed. “But if Annie had stayed home more …” She was too well bred to mention John’s abandonment of Annie. I felt her turn slightly toward the head of the table where John always sat.

  “Mother, that’s over.”

  “Well, from what Annie tells me there’s another man in the house.”

  I said nothing.

  “A single man. Am I right, Helen? Or formally single. Annie tells me he’s engaged.”

  “Right.”

  “But you’re not.” Mother waited for an answer. “Helen? But you’re not.”

  “I’m—”

  “You’re a single woman,” Mother went on. “So I trust while Annie’s been ill you have not spent time alone with Mr. Fagan.”

  “Mother, he’s my secretary.”

  “As long as Annie was with you that’s fine. But from now on I’ll be in the room with you two whenever you do your … letters.”

  A headache began to throb behind my temples. To be fair, my mother never imagined the grief she would have after I became deaf and blind before my second birthday. How could she have known what to do? She was the spoiled daughter of a wealthy Memphis family, and when I couldn’t see or hear, some of her relatives demanded that she send me to the Alabama Asylum for the Insane and Infirm. She refused. She found me Annie, fought with my father to send me to school, and for all that I loved her, loved her beyond myself. And for the second time in my life I would bring her unbearable grief.

  “I trust you behaved yourself.”

  “You have my word.” I withdrew my hand and picked up my teacup, its porcelain so thin.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Unlike Annie, who was partially blind from the age of seven until she was sixteen, my mother never learned the shape of the earth by touching an orange, as Annie taught me to do, never walked past a factory so filled with heat that she thought, as I did at age seven, that the sun had fallen to the earth; she never felt her way down an alley, fearful of getting lost.

  No, blindness was foreign to my mother—for that I am grateful.

  But I never said this: I traveled the world, I rallied crowds of thousands outside factories on behalf of workers’ rights in New York, Boston, and Chicago, found my way down streets in Berlin, Paris, and Rome, places where my mother never ventured.

  Imagine my pride—and my sorrow: I had vast stretches of loneliness and fear, but still I was freer than my mother, who lived mostly alone.

  I had to lie to her about my engagement to Peter. I didn’t have the will to confide in her when I had a new life to live—my own.

  Annie came in, and the slight shaking of the table told me she was tapping her shoe against the floor. Mother and I sat side by side, and after Annie passed us platters of pot roast, scented with rosemary, and biscuits, she sat down and handed me a letter.

  “Helen, did you write this letter lambasting the French?” Annie spelled to me.

  “Where did you find that?” I said.

  “In your study. Now did you write it or not?”

  “Yes.” I kept my hand in Annie’s. I felt her lean toward Mother to tell her what I’d done. I held my breath, waiting for Mother’s response.

  “Perfect, Helen,” Annie spelled to me. “Your mother wants to know if I put you up to this.”

  I said nothing.

&nb
sp; “It was that Fagan, Kate,” Annie spelled to Mother, and to me. She then passed a bowl of peas. “I left Helen alone with him for one day and she goes and acts like a traitor.”

  “Mr. Fagan put you up to this?” Mother took the bowl from me, her fingers smooth in mine. “When exactly did this happen?”

  “Yesterday. When Annie was at the doctor’s. Peter whipped out my response on the typewriter. That’s his job, Mother.” I tried to ease the tension in her touch.

  Mother turned from me to face Annie.

  “You left Helen alone with this man?”

  “He’s not important,” Annie said. “We have more important things to worry about.”

  “Helen.” Mother took my arm. “How did this happen? With this Mr. Fagan? Wasn’t Annie supposed to watch you?”

  Annie, never one to avoid a fight, sprang up to defend herself. Almost choking on her cough, she said, “Watch Helen? Kate, in case you haven’t noticed, this is the same Helen who punched out my front tooth when she was seven years old. You want me to watch her twenty-four hours a day?”

  “Annie, if I’m not mistaken, it is your job to keep Helen away from this—or any—man.”

  “How am I to do that,” Annie snapped, “when I may have to move six hundred miles away?”

  With a final bang of the door she was gone.

  Mother pushed back her chair and rose to her full height. “Bring Mr. Fagan downstairs.”

  I rapped three times hard on the floor for Peter, in our signal.

  “But first I have one more objection.”

  “Yes?” I stood.

  “F-a-g-a-n. What kind of name is that?”

  “Mother, please.”

  “Where is his family from?”

  “Ireland. They’re Catholics.”

  “Helen, you keep up with the news. Surely you’ve read about the trouble Irish Catholics are causing these days. They don’t hold down jobs. They’ve rioted in New York. Think of your family, Helen. First you defended the Negroes in that letter to the newspaper—”

  “That was fifteen years ago.”

  “And they still haven’t forgotten about it in Montgomery. Every time your sister, Mildred, has her card club over, someone says you disgraced the Keller family. Now these people.”