by Jean Little
Anna smiled. She had spent a lot of time with Elizabeth that summer. Mrs. Schumacher had taught her how to give the baby a bath, had let her feed her and take her out in the carriage. Anna had loved pushing that buggy along, pretending the baby inside it was hers, sometimes. She was proud to be trusted with Elizabeth. But right now she was glad the baby was out of the way.
Mrs. Schumacher led the way into the living room. She seemed to know, from the beginning, that this was not one of Anna’s customary visits, that she had come about something serious. She knew, of course, about Rudi. But not about his nights. Only Anna knew that.
Anna told Eileen Schumacher everything, all the small things and the big ones that were worrying her.
A man from the Canadian National Institute for the Blind had come to see Rudi, soon after Papa brought him home. Anna had just come in from school so she stayed to listen.
“Rudi was perfectly polite,” she told Mrs. Schumacher. “But, at the end, he said, ‘I don’t think I’m quite ready yet for the things you’re suggesting, sir. I just want to rest at the moment. I’ll have my father telephone your office when I think you can help me.’”
“That sounds good,” Mrs. Schumacher said. “It sounds as though he realizes he has to give himself a while to adjust, and then he’ll ask for help.”
“It does sound like that,” agreed Anna, struggling to put her anxiety into words. “His words always sound all right. But there’s nothing underneath what he says. It’s as though he’s not really there. Just politeness and words but not Rudi himself. I’m sure he only listens enough so he can make the right answers. Otherwise he doesn’t care. And nothing he says really means anything.”
She paused and took a deep breath. Mrs. Schumacher waited for her to go on.
“And, oh, in the night …” Anna’s story came spilling out.
“Once I heard him praying to die,” Anna said, the horror of that moment still dark in her eyes. “He begged! But that’s not the most frightening thing. It’s hard for me to know how to say it. To me, the worst part is that he is going further and further away from us. He’s disappearing, escaping maybe, into some safe secret place where nobody can reach him or hurt him anymore.”
She stopped, trying to get her thoughts in order. Although she didn’t want to repeat herself, she had to make it clear. Her friend still said nothing, seeing Anna had not finished.
“What’s wrong is you can’t live in that place. I’ve been somewhere like it. A little like it, anyway. It’s like being shut up inside a shell with no way out. I remember. I still dream about it sometimes.”
“Oh, Anna,” Eileen Schumacher said.
Anna paid no attention. She was not sorry for that little girl now; she was worried about Rudi.
“When I was small and everything seemed so hard and Rudi was mean, I went there, but I couldn’t love anybody from inside that place. You and Bernard and Ben and Isobel and Papa all rescued me. You just broke the shell, a little at a time, until you could come in and I couldn’t stop you. You could come in and I could come out.”
Mrs. Schumacher smiled at that. She even laughed softly.
“You were extremely prickly at first, I must admit,” she said. “I thought of you, I remember, as a little porcupine with all its quills sticking out. And I can see why you are concerned now. But what do you want to do?”
“I want to rescue Rudi,” Anna said simply. “I think — I don’t know why — that we could wait too long. He might go so far in we’d never be able to bring him back.”
Mrs. Schumacher sat still, on a low hassock, her arms clasped around her knees. She looked at the child — no, the young woman — facing her.
“I think you have a plan, don’t you, Anna?” she said. “I can see it in your face. Tell me. That’s what you really came for, isn’t it?”
Anna nodded, not surprised that Mrs. Schumacher had guessed. She had always been good at reading the minds of the children she taught. But she wanted this plan to be a secret. It had to be or it wouldn’t work. This was going to be the tricky part. She had no choice but to trust her old teacher.
“It’s like this,” she said, and explained. She did not confide her whole idea, not the last part she would play in it by herself, if she had to. She would only do it if the first part wasn’t enough and, whatever happened, it would be between Rudi and her, no one else.
“Can you help?” Anna asked. “Will you?”
“That’s a tall order, Anna, but I think perhaps I can. I can try anyway,” Mrs. Schumacher said slowly, thinking ahead as she spoke. “I’ll have to do some persuading but Franz can help. You don’t mind him knowing, Anna?”
Anna shook her head. She felt giddy with relief. There had been the chance that Mrs. Schumacher would not go along with the idea.
“Maybe, very likely in fact, we’re going about this all wrong and we should leave it to the professionals,” Mrs. Schumacher said, hesitating for one moment.
“I know Rudi better than anyone,” Anna said, surprised to realize this was true. “I know how he can put people off. I think … you see, he was so mean to me once, not just one time but often, back a few years before I knew you even. We don’t speak of it now but he feels sorry when he thinks of it. Or he did, before he went away. Then last year we got to be a sort of team. Maybe, because of those things, I can get through to him. I do want to try. If I fail and it doesn’t help, then someone else, some grown-up, can still do the professional things.”
Getting ready to put Anna’s plan into operation took nearly a month. She had to go over to the Schumachers almost every day after school.
“What’s gotten into you? I’ve hardly seen you for days,” Maggie protested.
“It’s something I’m trying to do for Rudi,” Anna said, knowing that would silence all objections.
“Can we help?” Suzy wanted to know.
Anna shook her head.
“I can’t talk about it so don’t ask,” she said.
Can I help? she wondered.
It was too late to back down. The night came when she had to try it, good or bad, right or wrong. She went up to Rudi’s room and got things ready in an out-of-the-way corner where he would be sure not to trip over anything. She went back down, waited the long, long hours till bedtime, and tried not to grow so afraid, while she was waiting, that she would be unable, in the end, to carry her plan through. She also had to keep all of this inner turmoil hidden from her family. She had never in her life been more grateful than she was that night when Mama said, as usual:
“Off to bed, Anna. Sleep well.”
The time had almost come.
Chapter 22
Anna had worried about falling asleep but she was far too tied up in knots even to doze. She heard all the noises of the household settling down: water running in the bathroom, Papa and Mama talking downstairs, light switches being clicked off, the last news broadcast signing off with “God Save the King,” beds creaking. Papa began to snore. After an endless stretch of time, she heard Rudi start to walk, back and forth, as though he were locked in a cage.
She took a small flashlight, borrowed from Dr. Schumacher, eased out of bed without making a sound, inched her way cautiously to his bedroom, opened the door soundlessly and slid her body around it, beamed the thin line of light down at the talking book machine and reached for the knob that turned it on. She waited till Rudi was on the far side of the room. He was talking to himself. She couldn’t hear the words, only muttering, but they made him miss the one little click. She had worried about that click ahead of time and never dreamed it would be so simple.
Breathing shallowly, doing her level best to keep her hand steady, she moved the phonograph needle into place.
“A Tale of Two Cities,” a man’s voice read out, startling even Anna who had known what was coming, “by Charles Dickens. Read by Stanley Wellman.”
Having practised at the Schumachers over and over, Anna then moved the needle a little further on in order to miss all the
part about it being a talking book to be used exclusively by blind people, and to reach the story itself. It caught the tail end of the last word of what she wanted to skip and then went on, the deep voice speaking the words with love, with respect, exactly the way they should be read.
It was the worst of times, it was the best of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief …
“What is it? Turn it off. Stop it! Who’s there?” Rudi cried out.
She had been amazed he had let the record play that long. She switched it off.
“It’s only me, Anna,” she said. “That was the first record of a talking book. I picked it because I knew you liked it, even though you had read it before. I thought …”
“Anna, please, I told you, leave me alone,” Rudi said.
“I will in a minute,” she answered, keeping on even though she could hear her voice starting to shake. “But first I have to do one more thing. Listen, just this once. I want to read you something.”
Rudi said nothing but she could feel his mind set against her. If anything, the wall was stronger.
Slowly, painstakingly slowly, she began to read. She had marked off the breaks in the first paragraph with bits of paper glued to the page. Since she had been following, she knew how to pick up exactly where the reader on the record had been cut off.
“It … was … the … epoch … of … in … cre … du … li … ty … it … was the … sea … son … of … light —”
“Anna,” he stopped her.
“Yes?” she said.
“Why are you reading like that, so slowly?”
“It’s very fast for me. I only know the basic alphabet, none of the abbreviations. If I didn’t have it practically memorized, I’d have been slower still,” she said, not giving him a direct answer, trying to make him go on talking.
“Anna,” he said again.
“Yes?” Anna said, her heart lifting a fraction for his voice sounded alive. Not warm or understanding or welcoming. But curious and really Rudi’s.
“How are you reading?”
“In Braille,” Anna said.
“Were you looking at it?”
“No. How could I be? I didn’t turn on the light.”
There was a long silence. Then she began to talk to him in a quiet, level, almost angry voice.
“Rudi, stop being the way you are. You’re not you at all. If I can read Braille after only a few lessons from Mrs. Schumacher, you can too. You can listen to this book all night here in the darkness instead of pacing up and down, up and down.”
“So you did hear me other nights,” he said softly, bitterly.
“Yes. I’ve always heard you. But I’m talking about something else. You’re going away inside. Mama says you’re getting better. You have even Papa nearly fooled …”
“But not smart little Anna,” he mocked.
“No, not me,” she said. “Because I know how it is.”
“You know!” he jeered again.
But once more she was glad, for he sounded ready to fight. She had not heard him ready to fight for weeks. Now she would have to use her last weapon, the one she had withheld till now.
“I couldn’t see much till I was nine,” she said, “and you, you called me Awkward Anna and made fun of me and kept saying I was stupid. Do you remember that? I was more afraid of you than of anyone.”
“But I didn’t know,” he said, taken off guard by her sudden attack.
“Oh, it’s all over long ago, that hurting. And I wasn’t like you because I didn’t know either that I couldn’t see properly. I believed you were right, that I was stupid and clumsy and no good. I believed you so much that I went away inside myself where you couldn’t reach me to keep hurting. Like you, now.”
“Where’s the phonograph?” he asked suddenly.
Anna knew when to stop.
“Let me turn on the light for myself,” she said, “and I can get you to it. I used a tiny flashlight to help me find it before, so you wouldn’t hear me and I could surprise you.”
“You’re just lucky I didn’t have a heart attack,” her brother said, as she pulled his hand into the crook of her elbow and led him to the talking book machine. Showing him how to operate it was simple. “The records go around much more slowly than on our own phonograph,” she explained, “and here are all the other records that make up the rest of the book.”
He picked them up and carefully put them back down.
“I can teach you the Braille alphabet, which is how everybody begins, after school — if you help me with my math, that is.”
She held her breath while she waited. Had she gone too far?
Then he laughed, a cracked little laugh which sounded something like a sob. But Anna knew it was laughter.
“Go back to bed, Little Stupid, little Awkward Anna,” he said. “We’ll see what tomorrow brings when we get there. Turn out the light when you go.”
She got up and left him, without another word, because she couldn’t speak with such a lump in her throat. She ran to her alcove, fell onto her bed and lay there, listening.
Would the pacing begin again?
What had she done?
He hadn’t promised anything.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times …,” the voice began again.
Then it said, “… it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope …”
Anna hugged her pillow to her and let the tears of joy come any old way they wanted to.
Chapter 23
The two of them kept their secret for a week. It wasn’t that hard. Anna simply disappeared up the stairs when she came home from school, as though she were busy reading before it was time to help with supper. She was extremely careful not to get a detention, even to the point of not answering when her friends whispered things to her. She tried to explain without really telling them anything. She hoped they forgave her. She was sure that Maggie at least would. But she was too excited at the moment to care if they didn’t. The other three Solden young people were busy with extracurricular activities at school and were always later coming home. Mama and Papa, of course, were at the store.
Later, when Rudi stopped minding, everyone would know the story, or most of it. Some parts would always stay just between Anna and her brother.
The first afternoon, when she ran up to his room, she was terribly afraid she would find him withdrawn again and angry at her too. But the moment she arrived, he deluged her with talk.
“I’m half-asleep because I stayed up all night listening to that book,” he told her, “but I’m awake now, Anna, and I’m here, back from wherever you said I’d gone. I still don’t see any future but I can see a right now.”
“The present moment is all you ever really have,” Anna said, sounding wise. Then she had to laugh and admit she was only quoting something she had heard their father say once.
“It was partly that … oh, I couldn’t bear to start back at the beginning and ask some stranger, Is this ‘A?’ and how do you write ‘c-a-t.’ There are thousands of things blind people have to learn, I’ve been told,” he said, not noticing he had used the word “blind” or not letting her see he knew. He had never said it out loud before, not once.
“Anybody would hate having to —” Anna began.
“Most people,” he interrupted her. “We hate to appear like fools. But I remembered the day you came and asked me why you changed the minus sign to a plus and added. You knew it was basic. All your friends got it. You knew I was studying university math so it would seem exactly like the ABCs to me. And you’d been told for years that you were a dumb cluck. Yet you had the nerve to say, ‘I don’t know this. Teach me.’”
Anna, also remembering back, realized that it had not really been that way at all. She had asked him because he had been crying and she had not known what else to do. So she wasn’t brave, the way he thought. But she didn’t contradict him.
“I really did think I couldn’t help you with math when you asked me,” he went on. “But this morning I saw that all mathematics happens inside somebody’s head before it ends up on paper. Your mind figures it out and you write down what your mind is doing. Nothing’s gone wrong with my mind!”
“No, not a thing,” Anna said. “Except I thought you were going crazy.”
She could say it outright now because her fear was a thing of the past. Or she hoped it was. Rudi’s dark glasses hid his scarred eyes but his grin looked reassuring. He held out his hand and she took hold of it.
“I think maybe I was going a little crazy,” he said, no longer smiling, but his handclasp was firm. “I was afraid. I even thought of killing myself, only I didn’t know how. Then I thought of Mama …”
“I should hope so!” said his sister, jerking her hand free and slapping at his. “And all the rest of us too! Mind you, Suzy Hughes would probably have thought it was beautifully tragic and romantic.”
“Too bad, Suzy Hughes,” he said, laughing again. Then he turned to her, putting out both hands palms up in supplication. “Teach me, Dummkopf. Teach me so when the real teachers come crowding at me, I’ll have a head start on them.”
“I knew you’d feel like that,” Anna said and she began.
He was quicker to learn than she had been.
She phoned Mrs. Schumacher to arrange to get him another couple of talking books.
“What happened?” Mrs. Schumacher demanded.
“It was all right. But would you mind if we told Papa and Mama first? Then I’ll come and tell you everything,” Anna said, feeling mean but not wanting to talk anymore behind Rudi’s back.
“Just knowing it’s all right is enough for now,” the teacher said, relief and delight mingled in her voice. “I was pretty worried. I’ll get you the records. You can pick them up at our place.”
Anna smuggled in the big flat metal boxes when nobody but Rudi was home. For the present, he only listened to them when he knew the house was empty. He had already made it clear that when he was in his room he wanted no visitors. The chiming clock downstairs helped him keep track of when the dangerous hours were drawing near.
