Miss Spitfire

by Sarah Miller

  “And no one but me is willing to delve into your head,” I marvel. “They’d sooner starve your mind than see a few untouched morsels on your supper plate.”

  Unless I can prove Helen’s mind needs as much nourishment as her body.

  Chapter 23

  “M-u-g” and “m-i-l-k,” have given her more trouble than other words.

  —ANNE SULLIVAN TO SOPHIA HOPKINS, MARCH 1887

  From that moment I throw myself wholeheartedly into Helen’s education. Following Dr. Howe’s example, I make myself hold regular lessons at set times. I line the objects in a row and drill her again and again. But I spend the whole day long spelling, pouring words across her palm like streams of water.

  All the day through I talk into Helen’s hand. Not only single words, but whole conversations. When I speak, she touches my throat, feeling the buzz of my voice. Nothing like thought crosses her face, but the vibrations hold her transfixed, and I wonder if she has any sort of a memory of her own voice.

  Trouble is, I don’t know how to gauge Helen’s progress. Measured in the amount of cake Helen consumes each day—I give her a bite as a reward each time she spells a word correctly—our work would fill a pantry. But even that mountain of cake hasn’t taught her a thing. She copies new words day after day, never forgetting the old ones, and never shows a hint of understanding. It’s as if her fingers have a memory all their own, separate from whatever sense lies sealed behind her eyes and ears. If it weren’t for the cake, she’d show little more interest in spelling than she does in the hairbrush or washbasin.

  And yet she prompts me to spell words now, patting my hand as though she wants to know the name of something. But the way she moves is so mechanical, her face so flat and uncurious, that I’m sure she’s only mimicking me. She’s come to expect a finger motion to match any object we touch, the way rain follows thunder. When I spell a word at her request, she ignores it, using nothing but her gestures to get what she wants. And she never bothers to repeat a word unless I cue her with that same patting.

  One day under the pecan tree she finds a broken robin’s egg. She brings it to me and pats my hand. I spell “egg,” then double my hands on the ground, the way I saw her do that first morning in the kitchen. She squats and cups her hands like a bowl with the egg inside.

  N-e-s-t, I spell. She grunts and searches through the grass. “Looking to raid the nest, you little vixen?” Instead she finds a pecan and brings that to me. I spell “pecan,” and her search shifts from eggs to nuts.

  When her pockets are full of pecans, she makes a hammering motion. I spell “hammer” to her, making her repeat it, then she makes her way along the path to the barn and kicks at the door until a stable hand comes running.

  “Pat her hand” I command him. He gives me a sideways glance but does as he’s told. I stand close by, praying for Helen to spell to him. Instead she shakes his fingers loose and makes the hammering motion again.

  I slump with disappointment.

  Shrugging, he plucks a wooden mallet from the wall of tools, and Helen scampers off.

  As I watch her crack open the pecans on the brick path, I seethe with frustration. The feeling reminds me of my blind years—tantalized by the half sights around me, with no way to make sense of them.

  Sitting in Uncle John’s pasture, I’d twine my hands through the grass, twisting the long blades. My fingers told me they were slim and smooth as snakes’ tongues, but my eyes couldn’t distinguish one blade from another. No matter how near the ground I crouched, I saw only a blur of green as featureless as a woolen blanket. Knowing my eyes couldn’t show me the grass as it truly was made me rip great clumps of it from the ground.

  I grow to love and hate her homemade signs. She has signs for all sorts of things—people, objects, and even verbs. Many of them she’s invented since we’ve come to the little house. They prove her instinct to communicate, but I’d like to scream each time she creates a gesture for a word I’ve already taught her, like “bead,” “hammer,” “crochet,” “dumbbells,” and “crack-the-whip.”

  Almost every day one of her signs confounds me. One afternoon she tugs at my sleeve in the middle of a lesson. Linking her fingers, she brings the heels of her hands together, like a hinge.

  “What’s this?” I ask. With a shake of my head I continue my spelling. Frowning, she shoves my hands aside and repeats her sign. I shrug. Her face constricts, and she works her hands in the jawlike motion once again, then waits.

  I don’t have the first notion what she wants. I haven’t taught her the name of any object that opens and shuts that way. “What is it—a book? A door? Chattering teeth?” When I don’t respond, she pushes her hands into my face, pounding them together. Surprised by her intensity, I bar her with an arm and try to sit her back down. Her eyebrows furrow; heat rises from her skin. Huffing, she gropes over the table. Nothing in reach satisfies her. Once more she levers her hands before my face, imploring me with her unnamed want.

  I shake my head. I can’t even tell her I don’t understand, not really.

  The anger grips her before my eyes. Her hands slow; her body shakes. I watch her chest heave faster and faster, see her fists ball. She makes the sign one last time, then throws back her head and wails.

  “I don’t know how they could take this as mindlessness,” I whisper as the sound penetrates me. “Anyone can see your brain is screaming to be let loose. But you don’t even know what you’re struggling toward, do you?”

  Even in Tewksbury I had it better than Helen—I knew there was a way out of my prison.

  • • •

  One day the wards rustle with quiet commotion. “Investigation,” I hear them say. “A commission from Boston.” Amid the whispers of public scandal and outrage I hear the name Sanborn, and my heart begins to race. It’s been four years since I learned that name—Frank B. Sanborn is the man you want to see about going to school, someone said—and this is the first time I’ve heard it outside of my own dreams.

  My situation is so ridiculous I want to sob with frustration. I’m not even certain Mr. Sanborn is among the commission, and blind as I am, how can I possibly recognize a man I’ve never met? But if I am to get out of this place, this is my only chance. From ward to ward I follow the tight bunch I hope are the investigators, straining to hear something that might tell me if any of them is Mr. Sanborn.

  By the time they reach the big stone gate, I’m quivering with the desperation. Hurling myself into their midst, I cry, “Mr. Sanborn, Mr. Sanborn, I want to go to school!”

  I collide with a mass of legs and elbows. Woolen coat sleeves smear the tears across my cheeks. A hand grasps my arm. “What is the matter with you?” a voice asks.

  Suddenly spent, I can only stammer, “I—I can’t see very well.”

  “How long have you been here?” asks another.

  “I don’t know.”

  The voices rumble together, but they say no more to me. Someone pushes the hair from my face, straightens my apron. A handkerchief drops into my hand, and before I’ve realized what’s happened, the men are gone. I stand there hiccuping, wondering what’s to become of me, if anything at all. As I drag my feet away from the gate, my fingers find a bit of embroidery on a corner of the handkerchief, and once again I have a hope to cling to. Spelled out in fine floss are the initials FBS.

  • • •

  I wish I knew how to tell Helen that my spelling is her way out. “The key is in your very grasp,” I whisper. My fists clench, then go slack.

  Her breath spent, Helen sinks to the floor, moaning. The mournful sound of it makes me want to curl away and hide. I soothe her the only way I know how: I swing the door open, then lift her to her feet and coax her out to the garden. There she creeps under a hedge and buries her face in the broad ivy leaves.

  “There’s at least some feeling alive in you,” I sigh. The thought brings little consolation. Can she possibly realize what makes her so miserable?

  She can’t tell a soul how she
feels. She can’t even think it to herself. No wonder she spends her days kicking and screaming—what else is she to do with herself? Watching her huddle among the cool leaves for comfort, I wonder if she lashes out in fear as well. She must feel so small when the rage overpowers her. I shake my head at the thought of it: This brazen tyrant could actually be terrified by her own feelings.

  Determined to spare her another frustration-tempest, I concoct a multitude of strategies for breaking into Helen’s mind. I teach her verbs—“sit,” “stand,” and “walk”—guiding her from one action to the next like a puppet on a string. I try to connect my words with her gestures, spelling m-o-t-h-e-r if she rubs her cheek, e-a-t when she makes a chewing motion, or b-a-b-y when she rocks her arms back and forth. Nothing changes. In desperation I spell out the very ideas I’m trying to force into her head letter by letter: A word is a symbol. It stands for an object. Its meaning is the same to everyone who uses it.

  Day after day the mug-milk difficulty torments me. No matter what I do, Helen persists in confounding the two. I fill glasses, teacups, and bowls with milk, hoping to distract her from the notion of the mug entirely. I let her follow my hands pouring the milk from one vessel to another. Each time she tastes the liquid, she answers my tap with m-u-g. When I produce the mug to correct her mistake, she switches her reply to m-i-l-k. I snatch it from her and fling the horrid thing into the garden. A moment later my resolve returns, and I march outside to retrieve it. Set on unsnarling Helen’s confusion, I return to the little house and begin all over again.

  One evening at milking time I take Helen to the barn. After setting the mug under a particularly patient cow, I hold one of Helen’s hands under the streams while I spell “milk” into the other.

  No good. M-u-g, she insists.

  With a groan I flop my head onto the cow’s warm flank.

  The next day I leave the mug at the little house and wet Helen’s lips with milk hot from the cow’s teat. Even with the taste on her tongue, she spells “mug” when I ask. I squirt a creamy jet into her face, my throat gravelly with the discouragement.

  I wonder if a better teacher could have unlocked Helen’s thoughts by now. I have more faith in Helen’s mind than I have in my abilities. At least I know there’s something inside her, scrabbling to get out. What is there in me but worry and doubt? Dr. Howe called for patience and zeal in educating the deaf-blind. I don’t know if I have either. Back on Uncle John’s farm I had patience enough to lure birds into my bare hands, but I’m so flummoxed by Helen’s stalled progress I’d like to shake her until the pieces of her lessons fall into place.

  By the end of the week Captain Keller insists Helen return to Ivy Green. I can hardly argue. I asked to keep her sequestered only as long as it took for her to obey and depend upon me. I’ve accomplished that much, at least. But there’s no guarantee my teachings will hold, and I have never been good at leaving anything behind, good or bad. So much has already slipped through my fingers.

  • • •

  When the visiting priest, Father Barbara, says he’s taking me away from Tewksbury for an operation on my eyes, I cry and tell him I don’t want to go. My sight is little more than bewildering swirls of colors, like ladies’ skirts always dancing before me, but I don’t care. In the months since Jimmie died, Tewksbury has become all the home I have.

  I’m right to be afraid. When the doctors’ work is done, I’m no sooner put to bed with a bandage over my eyes than another woman arrives, rescued from a fire. Her moans and screams tear through the ward, and the scent of charred flesh stings my nostrils. The talk I hear is of skin and cloth melted together, singed flesh sloughing off in pieces, and white bones shining through it all. A picture worse than anything I saw at Tewksbury forms in my mind, and I cry and flail until the bandage comes loose from my eyes and the nurses carry me away.

  After all that, the operation isn’t much use. All it does is turn the swirls into a blur. But away from the almshouse, I get a glimpse of another world. I help the sisters deliver baskets to the poor. From time to time I slip into Saint Patrick’s Church to peer at the chalice and carvings on the altar. Often Father Barbara joins me there and chants the stations of the cross to me, or sits still and quiet in the pews, pretending to listen to a sermon. Other days we walk along the river Merrimac, hand in hand, and at night he reads to me of Saint Bridget, Saint Lucia, Saint Catherine. For a few days some friends of Father Barbara’s take me in, a dark house where it’s my job to wipe the dishes, and there I discover a piano. I bang away gleefully until someone yanks me from the bench.

  When the next operation is done, there are no burn victims to torment me. The nurse is kind and lets me make lemonades, chipping ice from the great block in the kitchen myself and adding all the sugar I want. My eyes are no different, but every day calm-faced nurses fuss over me, and there are plates of fruit and slices of bread almost as soft and white as my sheets.

  Before long the doctors decide they’ve done all they can with me. Father Barbara is gone, called away on duty. His friends don’t want me back in their house, and the hospital can’t keep me. Tewksbury looms before me. The thought of leaving this clean and decent place for what lies behind the stone gates of the almshouse makes the fear rear up like a cold wind inside me. Howling, I fasten myself to the doctor’s leg until they peel me away.

  • • •

  The thought of the days ahead of me at Ivy Green, the dread of more clashes with the Kellers over Helen’s discipline, makes that same cold fear whirl through me. We’ve taken one great step forward, and after this glimpse of success I have no intention of giving any ground back. But where will I find the strength to stand between Helen and the overindulgence of her parents?

  Chapter 24

  I have pointed out that the processes of teaching the child that everything cannot be as he wills it, are apt to be painful both to him and to his teacher.

  —ANNE SULLIVAN TO SOPHIA HOPKINS, MARCH 1887

  My heart pounds. My fingers, so used to moving when I speak, itch to spell. I clasp my hands in my lap and urge myself to be brave.

  Across from me on the parlor sofa Mrs. Keller and Helen sit side by side, fitted together like the strands of a braid. Mrs. Keller strokes Helen’s cheek with the backs of her fingers, softly as a kitten smoothing its whiskers. Behind them the captain stands with his hands resting one on each side of his wife and daughter. Seeing them framed in contentment, I wish I could join their intimate circle. I pray my words won’t ruin the scene before me.

  I draw a deep breath. “You must not interfere with me in any way.”

  The captain’s face crimps like the mouth of a satchel drawing together. He glances down at his small family, then at me. His eyes tell me to be cautious, but they don’t keep me from speaking.

  “I know it hurts to see your child punished, and even more because of her afflictions. Whatever you think of me, I’ll tell you, it’s painful for me as well. But allowing Helen her way in everything is a terrible injustice.” The conviction behind these words surprises me. The Kellers, too, look puzzled.

  “An injustice,” I insist, the words coming unbidden. “Not only to you and me, but to Helen. You let her behave like a common imbecile, tolerating those fits. She’s a bright child, yet you allow her to make a fool of herself with every tantrum. She may not understand the reason behind good behavior, but she’s smart enough to mimic it. At least let her have that small dignity.”

  Mrs. Keller looks up, her eyes bleary with tears. I can’t guess the emotion behind them. “But she has so few pleasures, Miss Annie.”

  Exasperation makes my words harsher still. “That’s no excuse for bad behavior. The world outside Ivy Green won’t bend to her will, Mrs. Keller. And neither of us will be with her forever. Who in their right mind will cater to her whims when you’re gone?”

  “Miss Sullivan—,” the captain begins. I know where this is headed. We’ve been down this road more than once.

  I cut him off. “There’s no
reason to deprive her of anything—as long as she’s civil to the rest of us. I’m willing to grant Helen any luxury you can bestow her, provided she earns it. Let me hold her to what I’ve taught her—be consistent—and she’ll stay as calm and reasonable as she is this minute.”

  “Do you propose, Miss Sullivan,’ the captain says, straining for courtesy, “that we simply hand over our authority as parents?”

  I gulp, willing myself to hold my chin high in the face of the captain’s indignation. “Any interference will undermine everything I’ve accomplished these two weeks. Helen may be deaf, dumb, and blind, but she’s no fool. If she finds an easier path, she’ll take it and never look back. For now she’s tame, but given the chance, she’d turn on you like a mad dog.” I pause, chiding myself for the acrid words forming on my tongue. I smooth my face into dour seriousness. “I’d hate to have to take her away from you again.” This is not entirely true, but it has the desired effect. Mrs. Keller looks stricken; her arms pull Helen nearer.

  A lump comes into my throat. Why must I be so cruel? “Please, just let me have a free hand.”

  Mrs. Keller nods, wide eyed and fearful as a little child. I look to Captain Keller. Confronted with his wife’s tears, he assents.

  “You’ll speak to the rest of the family as well,” I prompt. He nods again.

  A shiver runs through my body. It’s done.

  “Wouldn’t you at least like to have a nurse for her?” Mrs. Keller offers.

  I blink at the question, my emotion breaking into confusion. “A nurse? Whatever for?”

  “To dress and feed and wash her. You’d have all your time to teach her.”

  “Helen’s perfectly capable of all that. A nurse will only get in my way. Every simple thing we do is a lesson in itself. Besides, I don’t need anyone else to look after.”

  And that is the end of that.

  Only a few hours later my agreement with the Kellers wavers with the threat of mutiny. We sit round the supper table, before platters heaped with mounds of food sweetened and sauced with Helen’s tastes in mind. In a sudden about-face Helen behaves long enough to earn me the barest morsel of respect before making a fool of me yet again.