by Rona Altrows
She did not speak of the matter. None of us did. I had the distinct feeling that Karl was ill at ease: I would need to repeat the simplest request to him two or three times before he even became aware that I was talking to him and he retreated to the library even more than usual. While I dreaded learning the truth, I simultaneously became less and less able to bear the uncertainty, and finally decided I must ask Karl directly. He will assure me it is not so, I told myself. He will say the child Lenchen carries was fathered by Friedrich Engels. After all, Mr. Engels was our house guest at the time Lenchen must have conceived, and Engels and Lenchen are fond enough of each other. Alas, no. Karl cried like a child and confessed; he placed the blame on a transitory weakness brought on by alcohol, loneliness in my absence, and the worst imaginable luck, since there had been only one brief encounter. I was unmoved by the tears of my little wild boar. I felt only revulsion.
Since then I cannot begin to describe to you the extent of my mental turmoil.
Our Franziska was born on March 28 of this year. In the summer Lenchen gave birth. A boy. She gave him up to a family in August; I know nothing of the arrangements she may have made to see her son, nor do I have any inclination to inquire. Lenchen continues to live with Karl and me and our children as though our household were under no strain. I have never spoken to her of her act of indiscretion with my husband. Karl does not talk of it, of course; indeed, he must hope I lose interest in the sordid liaison. He must wish that eventually all knowledge of it be erased from my memory.
The truth is I share that wish. How many more nights can I spend weeping and how many more days can I spend desiring to inflict some ill-defined harm on Lenchen, manager of my household, caretaker of my little ones, companion of mine since our youth? How long can I remain deeply distrustful of my beloved husband, the centre of my life? Karl and I and Lenchen all need one another.
It is my hope, dearest Sophie, that by telling you what has happened, I can finally relieve myself of resentment and suspicion, if not of secrecy. I put my trust in you without any condition or reservation, for I know you will keep this matter in complete confidence. If it were ever to come to light in my lifetime, the shame would destroy me and much more importantly, the information could cause incalculable damage to Karl’s work.
I hope you and Mr. Schmalhausen are in the best of health and spirits and that you and I will see each other again at a time of far greater tranquillity.
Yours ever,
Jenny Marx
TO JOHN A. MACDONALD FROM ELIZABETH HALL
Peterborough
Province of Canada
17 April, 1859
Loved John,
How I miss your company, your laugh, your quaint vests.
As it has now been a week since your last visit and you tell me in your last letter it will be a fortnight before you can come again, I have turned my mind to contemplation of what has occurred between us and what may come to pass in the days ahead.
I must say once again how grateful I am for all your assistance after what happened to George last year. One does not expect a man in his thirty-ninth year—a judge, once a politician, filled with vitality and ambition—to die. What fun you and George must have had together in Montreal during the ’forties when you served the Conservative cause together at the Legislative Assembly. George spoke to me often about your camaraderie at that time, not just as colleagues but as warm friends. It is a testimonial to the strength of your friendship that it continued right until his death. I have said this to you many times before, I know—forgive me, but I simply must restate—it meant a great deal to me when you undertook to administer George’s estate and to set up the trust funds for the children. How magnanimous of you to relieve me of those practical burdens in that wretched period.
You have done no wrong in visiting me openly in recent months. Why should you not, when there is nothing to hide? Nevertheless, a number of the fine folk of Peterborough, whom I shall not name here but whose identities you will, no doubt, arrive at through conjecture, have decided that our affairs are theirs. They speak in excited half-whispers, loudly enough for me to know they are talking about us, yet softly enough for me not to hear the entirety of their remarks. I cannot fathom the cause of their agitation. Surely it is normal and proper for two souls who are friends to intensify their relations when they both find themselves without mates.
But oh, Peterborough’s protectors of propriety say, Mrs. Hall is just past a year a widow; moreover, is it not unseemly for the premier to be spending time with any lady so soon after his wife’s demise? Why, she has only been gone since the winter of ’57.
And I inquire in return, is that not long enough for a vigorous man to grieve?
In any case, how little the righteous of Peterborough understand the patience with which you endured the demands placed on you by Isabella’s strange and mysterious illness, which no physician could ever identify, yet which rendered her an invalid for almost the whole fourteen years of your marriage. And all the while you were seeing to the well-being of your mother and sisters as well. Those trips to the United States to allow her to visit her sisters must have been a trial for both you and Isabella, with her always being so unwell. I am glad she had the benefit of comforting medicines—Godfrey’s Cordial, McMunn’s Elixir of Opium and the finest brand of laudanum, Mother’s Quietness. And when consumption set in, were you not the most generous of husbands? When the end drew nigh, did you not rush from Toronto to Kingston on Christmas Day and sit vigil by her bedside for three days until she slipped away?
As concerns past loves, I say you have done your duty and I, mine. May the tongues of the pious of Peterborough fall out of their mouths, for they have no conception of what I have with you. It is nothing they will allow themselves, even with their own husbands.
At the same time, more generous souls here have engaged in their own kind of speculation. These gentler people talk to me directly. “You are still quite young,” they tell me, “your waist is still as narrow as if you had never borne children, your features are pleasant, your spirit is strong. What an asset you would be to a politician with burning drive, as you were to your late husband, may he rest in eternal peace.”
Take what you will from what the kinder folk tell me. I am pleased to report their comments. Meanwhile, until the future is settled, I hope I bring you some combination of respite and pleasure.
Goodbye until the next time, my dear one.
Love,
Your darling Lizzie
TO PETER FAGAN FROM HELEN KELLER
February 5, 1917
Dear Peter,
This will be my last letter.
I need to do all I can to win back the trust of my mother, who does not know we have been corresponding.
You know how she reacted in the fall when she discovered our engagement through that awful article in the Globe. “That animal,” she called you. Her feelings have not changed. She is convinced you are a user who would have tried to exploit me by gaining access to famous people. Aware of your friendship with John Reed, your admiration of Emma Goldman and your opposition to the war, she was also afraid you would turn me into a radical.
So she said. But she knew, as everyone did, that I was already a committed socialist before we met; had written Out of the Dark; had made many anti-war speeches and statements of my own, and not just on the Chautauqua tours.
Her real reason for intercepting us was simply this: you are a man, and one who sees me as a woman. My mother and my teacher Mrs. Macy both believe there must be no such man for me. I am expected to set aside, for my whole life, all romantic and sexual urges. I am to be pure, three-sensed Helen, not a woman with normal desires but a mobile statue, representing nobility of spirit and selflessness.
It is lucky my mother cannot unlock my head at night and gain entry to my dreams. I can hardly imagine how shocked she would be.
Nevertheless, her actions are driven by love and worry for me, and I still feel sorrow for the way I behaved toward her at the time you and I planned our elopement. I was afraid she would ruin everything for us and of course, that is what she eventually did. But I had never been dishonest with her before, it put me into panic to deny the truth, and don’t think I could lie to her again, no matter what the reason.
Silence brings no peace to a deaf-blind child; it only cuts her off inhumanly from others and self. Where would I have been, how would I have ended up, without my mother’s work to find me help? How would I have met my teacher when I was seven, and what would I understand of this world today? Were it not for my mother’s efforts, and the arrival of Teacher, I would still be a phantom creature, existing in a time that had neither night nor day, and with only the most rudimentary consciousness, not even amounting to self-awareness.
When I was just out of my freshman year at Radcliffe, Dr. Bell, who is like a grandfather to me, invited me to his summer home in Cape Breton and talked to me in private, to explore my thoughts on love and marriage. He did not feel I should deprive myself forever. He wanted me to open my heart and mind to the possibility of some day becoming someone’s wife.
But, like my mother, Teacher has always said I should redirect my womanly urges. There is no place in my life for such nonsense, she says. Inevitably men deceive, she says (perhaps because she is so hurt, with her own marriage to John Macy having come to a bitter end). I should channel all my passion—of every kind—into my advocacy for the blind and deaf, my speaking engagements, my writings, my unofficial ambassadorship for all those who are different. Sink all that energy into the work, Teacher says.
I lied to Teacher too, about you and me. Now she puts up with my corresponding with you only because she knows that I intend to say goodbye to you forever, and she does not want me to fret, in future years, over things not said.
Still, I am human, and although I do not intend to have another adventure like ours, I will not forget it.
Of our time as a couple, the greatest joy for me came at the very start, last September. I was sitting in my study by myself, feeling utterly isolated and dejected, when you came in and took my hand. How I savoured our long silence, so different from the silence caused by missing a sense. The silence of you and me filled me up. Finally you spelled your feelings into my hand. I sometimes say every atom in my body is a vibroscope. Never more than then. I had not felt your hand in mine before except through your work as my temporary secretary, filling in for Polly. Now, in the study, you touched me differently, spoke into my hand as a lover. Oh, I can read a hand. Our love was simple. No obstacles had been placed in our path. No lies had been told to others.
Perhaps I should have followed my own instinct, to tell Mother and Teacher right away of our plan to marry, but I listened to you when you said we should wait a little, to give you a chance to grow on them. And so began the secrecy, the deceit, the discoveries that led to the unravelling of our plans.
Suppose we had done as I wished? Is it possible, as I have speculated, that our concealment only thwarted our chances? What if we had been able to carry out our elopement plans? If the city clerk’s office in Boston had not leaked to the press that we had applied for a marriage license. If my sister’s husband Warren had not gone after you with a gun.
Had we been able to carry out our plan, would you and I have embarked upon a happy life together? Would I have been filled with contentment, as I was when you held my hand that night in the study? Or perhaps I would have been so distracted by love for you that I would have neglected my work.
Perhaps you would have become frustrated with helping me constantly, with the loss of opportunity to pursue your own career as a journalist. Or you, like Teacher, might have developed chronic headaches after nine hours in a row of reading me newspapers, mail, and books not available in Braille.
I do not think there is an unfolding or outcome I have not considered in my ruminations. In my mind, we have lived as man and wife. How does our life together play out? That depends on which of my daydreams we choose. Our marriage has been a haven, a catastrophe, an isle of contentment, a bog of frustration.
I have carried on these imaginings for a month more or less, and a strange thing has happened. My romantic feelings have dissipated. I could not go back to you now even if it were possible, for I am no longer at the same point as I was last fall.
Finally, at 37, I have come to understand on a deeper level that my mother and my teacher are right. I know what I must do, where I must put my all my stamina.
As to what passed between you and me personally, I regret nothing. But now it is over, and I must continue with my life’s work. I hope you enjoy fulfillment as you forge ahead with your own life too. Please do not contact me again.
Goodbye,
Helen
TO RUTH DRAPER FROM AMY PIPERDALE
Galt, Ontario
June 10, 1945
Dear Miss Draper,
For years I have been following your career. Finally my dream of seeing you live turned to reality: I was in your audience last spring in Montreal, when you performed your one-woman show at the hospital where my fiancé, Damien, was under treatment. “In a Church in Italy,” what a drama. You portrayed—you became—to perfection, the pretentious artist, the earnest American tourist, the insistent beggar, the old woman immersed in supplication and prayer. And “Doctors and Diets,” another gem. How we howled as your character, Mrs. Grimmer, rambled on about the hundred-lemon juice cure and the miraculous Vitamin Q that builds the brain. We loved it when she (you) exclaimed, “Here we are in the best restaurant in town and none of us can eat!” For us that monologue was darkly comical, as Damien was living on bland institutional food and, of course, in a medical setting.
So many personalities presented and so many others evoked over so short a time by one person on a virtually bare stage, with no props save a few hats and shawls—how do you do it? What I noticed in particular was the compassion in your voice and the depth of expression in your eyes, even at the funniest moments. I could have, should have, tried to meet you afterward, to thank you personally for the show. However, bashfulness held me back, as it so often does.
I know you are friends with old Miss Wilks, and have stayed with her here in Galt at her Cruickston Park property. I am positive you were here last April and I have been given to understand you were also here in ’43. Perhaps it is a stretch to say Miss Wilks is a link between you and me. She is a well-to-do heiress whereas I come from more common stock. But as it happens, my family hails from Galt too. You have been here, you have visited with someone in my community, so surely that counts for something in the way of connection between you and me.
To be honest, I look for connection with you wherever I can. It is true I keep track of your tours, your command performances for royal personages and so forth, but I have also read newspaper articles touching on your personal life, including the event of 1931 that brought such tragedy to you. I wept in sympathy with you then. And now, of all the people on this confusing planet, you may be the only one who can fully comprehend my state of mind, my constant preoccupation.
You see, like you, I found what the French call “l’amour de ma vie” long after I thought any such thing could happen. When I met Damien four years ago, I was already in my forties; he, in his late twenties. He had been rejected for military service because of a history of heart problems. We first came across each other on a Saturday morning at the Red Cross Office in Montreal; we were among the voluntary workers assembling food parcels to be sent overseas to Prisoners of War. Somehow our eyes met, first by accident, then by design. At the end of our volunteer shift he invited me out for a bite at the Woolworth’s lunch counter on Ste. Catherine Street. The attention took me aback; I stumbled and stammered my way through a grilled cheese sandwich and strawberry ice cream soda. Undeterred by my reserve, Damien invi
ted me out again. And again. I felt ever more at ease with him as time went on.
Damien made his living as an engineer for the Bell Telephone Company but his true calling was as a writer of stories—slice-of-life stories, vignettes. He never tried to get them published—he wrote purely for pleasure. He did let me read some of his pieces and I was much impressed. Was his work of as high a quality as that of your love, Lauro de Bosis? I am a simple secretary and it is not within my ability to judge (although Damien often told me I underestimated myself and had it in me to do more, perhaps attend university and become a professional person of some kind.) In my opinion, for whatever it may be worth, Damien’s stories have power and beauty. Also delicious humour. When I first read them, my adoration for him grew.
For some reason, Damien found me fascinating. Once I became comfortable enough with him I was able to speak freely on many subjects. He called me an excellent conversationalist. I don’t know about that, but as a result of his kind words, I did muster up the courage to take a night class in Public Speaking at my alma mater, the High School of Montreal. It is not something I would ever have considered doing before we met.
We travelled to Ottawa together, to Quebec City, to Vermont. We were both still living in Montreal but I brought him on holiday to Galt to introduce him to my family. And it was here, on a sultry August night, that he proposed. I was euphoric.
But soon after we returned to Montreal and resumed our jobs, he fell ill. It was his heart again. He made an admirable effort to keep working, to go on living normally, but his condition continued to deteriorate. In the springtime, he was hospitalized. During this worrying period, your performance brought us a moment of brightness, for which we were grateful.
The doctors said he was starting to improve. My hopes surged. But just before his scheduled release from hospital, Damien had a massive coronary. They could not save him. For a while my despair defined me. I continued to go to my job every day but my existence was hollow. I had to decide whether to live or die. In six months, and with some help from my doctor, I chose to go on living. The goal then became to return to full mental health, and so I came back to Galt, to be close to family and long-time friends, at least for a while. Then I had to figure out how best to honour the memory of Damien. And that is the question that occupies my mind now.