Helen Keller in Love

by Kristin Cashore

  “Welcome to my life.” I opened the door with an easy click. “You translate their questions and my answers. We’ll be done with them lickety-split.”

  “Lickety-split. Where did you learn words like that?” A rush of air told me he’d opened his door.

  What I never learned was this: how a man like Peter did not want to be upstaged by me, and how easily I would do it. I knew about fame. I just didn’t know—or I refused to see—that Peter wanted to be cheered, toasted, revered, yet by my side he would become smaller. I wish now I had paid attention to the distant touch of his fingers as we left the car, the reporters clamoring for me, their notebooks scented with whiskey, tobacco, air.

  The reporters clustered by the front door: “Miss Keller.” They peppered me with questions when Peter and I moved up to the porch. Peter spelled their words into my palm, but pulled away slightly.

  “Miss Keller, sorry to bother you at home.”

  “You’re bothering me, all right,” I said to Peter, who told them.

  “Is it true,” they demanded, “that you gave royalties from your autobiography to blinded German soldiers? Isn’t that treason?”

  “Yes. I did do it,” I transmitted through Peter.

  Peter gripped the front porch railing facing the reporters. I felt him grow more resolute as he spelled to me and said to them that I was right to denounce President Wilson and to call for aid to all shell-shocked and wounded soldiers, not just Germans. He turned to walk me indoors, but then, as if he wanted to linger with the reporters, he turned back.

  “Are there any more questions?” He edged so close to the reporters that he moved away, dropping my hand.

  I stood alone by the front door. Isolation surrounded me. Where was Peter? Confused, I stepped forward, toward the scent of his tobacco. I reached out, but touched only air. The shudder of porch floorboards told me to keep moving forward until my hand grazed Peter’s arm. I took his hand and relief flooded me. He was my door to the world.

  “Tell me what they—”

  “Helen, they’re talking to me,” Peter spelled.

  “But I need to know …”

  “All right. O’Rourke from the Globe wants to know if I …”

  “If you … ?”

  “If I want to be Mr. Helen Keller.”

  The reporters laughed; I felt Peter’s hand flinch in mine. I wanted to pull him away, but he refused to leave.

  “We just heard that Henry Ford’s leased a ship for influential Americans to sail to Britain to negotiate a peace.” Peter spelled Danson’s next question to me. “Will you accompany Helen if she goes?”

  Peter stepped back, closer to the house.

  “Isn’t this house partly paid for by Andrew Carnegie? The same Carnegie whose money supports the war?” Peter’s spelling grew faint in my palm.

  “No, the house has nothing to do with Carnegie.”

  “Don’t the Kellers—even you—get their support from Carnegie, after all?”

  I felt the porch light, so hot on my head.

  “Peter, let’s go.”

  He tightened his hold on my wrist, and pulled me inside the house.

  I was startled by his forcefulness.

  You’re deaf. Can you hear music? People ask me this when I go to concerts, or laugh along at musicals and Broadway shows. How? Because as a band plays I “hear” soundwaves along the floor. I sit in a theater or concert hall with both feet flat under my chair and I listen with my feet: I thought of that as Peter and I stood alone in the front hall as the reporters crunched their way down the drive to their cars, but not with the same gait. One of them walked gracefully, with a light step, while the other rushed past to the beat of some inner discord.

  That’s how Peter is, I thought, as I slowly walked by his side into the living room. Not the reporter who walked smoothly, in sync with the world, but the other, more agitated one. Did Peter think I wouldn’t notice how upset and confused he was?

  We sat uneasily by the fireplace.

  “I don’t care about the Germans.” Annie paced the living room, her bathrobe warm to my fingers. She had waited in her bedroom until the reporters drove off, then walked in to confront me, determined to make me tell her where I’d been. I told her what happened on the front porch. She paused beside me and I felt her face. Worry lines, yes, but something new was there, too. There was a parchment-paper thinness to her skin, as if tuberculosis had already drained her. I kept my hand by her mouth to hear her speak, and even her voice was thin as string.

  “I was worried they would say you two were marrying. That is a headline I don’t ever plan to read.”

  “What would be so bad about that?” Peter said.

  “Everything. Especially since you’re fired.”

  “What?”

  “You’re leaving at the end of this month. Kate is here, and we don’t have enough money to pay you, anyway.”

  “I’ll fix that.” I stood perilously close to Peter, even with Annie nearby.

  “Helen, for God’s sake, no miracle is going to appear this time. We’re nearly broke. He’s got to go.”

  “I’m going to pray about it,” I said.

  “You’re not religious?” Peter acted as though he’d touched a snake.

  “Yes.”

  “Bibles as big as a dining-room table,” Annie said. “You haven’t seen them? Whole passages she’s read so many times the Braille is rubbed away.”

  “Good grief,” Peter said.

  “She’s a Swedenborgian.”

  “A what?”

  When I was young, people thought that I couldn’t be influenced by false ideas, sorrow, or death. So no one ever spoke to me of those things. One day Annie and I walked through a cemetery, and without knowing where we were I sensed the stillness and asked, “Who died here?” People wanted to think of me as some kind of angel. At a young age I asked Annie if I could study the Bible. “Who made me?” I asked Annie, and even though she had no belief in religion she said, “God.” I asked, “Who made God?”

  I learned in the Bible that people who are blind and deaf are just in a narrow passage in this life, that in the next one their sight and hearing will be restored. Later, in my adulthood, I learned there was a name for this kind of belief: Swedenborgianism.

  Yet even as I was comforted by this religion and the Bible, no one knew the dullness of my nights, the chill of winter days when I sat alone, no sound, no motion, no life around me.

  I stood between Annie and Peter as if to cause a slight thaw between them.

  “You wouldn’t catch me in a church if it had a door straight to heaven,” Annie said.

  “Maybe Helen needs something else to believe in,” Peter said.

  “Like a soon-to-be-unemployed man?”

  “I prefer the term ‘income-free.’”

  “I’m not blind,” Annie said. “I’ve been married to a loafer.”

  “He was a drinker. I’m not.”

  “John was a drainer. When he arrived we had a house fully paid for, and Carnegie money; ten years later the house is mortgaged to the hilt, we’re about to lose it, and our income’s so small a cricket couldn’t make a bed with it.”

  “I have news. John’s volunteered to drive an ambulance on the Western Front. Seems as if he wants to change things,” Peter said.

  “He wants to help people in foreign lands,” Annie said. “Just not those close by.”

  Peter turned serious. “And he left you with nothing but bitterness and debt.”

  “He left me, Helen, and …” Annie stopped.

  “Maybe Helen wants something different,” Peter said.

  “Over my dead body,” Annie said.

  At the mention of dying, a single ash seemed to float in the room, and Annie choked, deeply, as if she were drowning.

  When she stopped she said, “If death comes to me and Helen marries you, I’ll come back and kill you myself.”

  “The second coming at last,” Peter said.

  All night I sat
by Annie. Coughs had racked her body so insistently in the living room that she needed my help to make her way down the hall to her bedroom. Once in bed, furiously kicking off a quilt I put over her, she held my hand.

  “Get any ideas you’re having right now out of your head.”

  “What ideas?”

  “Running-off-with-lover-boy ideas.”

  She held my hand like a vise.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Here are the things I regret in my life: lying to Annie, lying to my mother. What I regret most is that I fell asleep in the chair beside Annie’s bed, and when morning came I did not notice that she had slipped out of the room. If I could go back and change that moment, I would.

  Because minutes later she hurried back in and shook me awake. “Come quickly,” she said. “I have news. Helen—now.”

  “What?” I yawned. The slow rumbling of a passing car made me turn to the window. Had Peter and Annie argued? Maybe that was his car, leaving.

  “Is it Peter?” I felt for Annie’s hand.

  “It’s a letter.”

  “Your tests? You have the results?” The floor felt chilly under my feet.

  Annie brushed my hair back and urged me up from the chair.

  “Annie, tell me. Are you very sick?”

  “For God’s sake, Helen. I’ve been sick all my life.” She shook my arm. “I don’t know anything yet about the TB. Those slowpokes are keeping me on tenterhooks. They’ll tell me at the last minute, after I’ve not slept for two weeks.”

  “They’ll tell you you’re fine,” I said.

  “They’ll tell me I’m doomed.” She tapped her foot, waiting for me to get up.

  Here’s what I imagine when I stand by Annie in her room, terrified that she might die: I am seven years old. Annie has not yet come into my life. I pat the damp ground of Tuscumbia, Alabama, next to our cook’s daughter, Martha Washington. Her skin dusky-dark, Martha grunts beside me, making a house of twigs and sticks with pasty mud. When I wham her leg she moves the way I want her to. She was my only friend until Annie arrived.

  In the first month after Annie’s arrival I pouted and stormed when she tried to make me eat from a plate; within two months I no longer stayed in the big house with my mother. I no longer needed to be violent with Martha Washington.

  No. I spelled w-a-t-e-r under the backyard pump, and Annie took me to live in the tiny house, the cabin next door, just Annie and me. It seemed, during those days and nights alone, the darkness was mushroomy, basil-scented in my child-mouth. When we left that house after several weeks to again live with my family, Annie and I were wrapped in a secret girl pact. I would be hers; she would be mine.

  She would be my raft out of darkness.

  So I felt Annie’s face. “Is it your eyes? You’ve gotten a letter from your eye doctor?”

  “How could I be your constant companion if I couldn’t see perfectly? Between us we need at least two good eyes.”

  What Annie said was ironic, because growing up, the world for her had always been a blue-black place, its people and objects in a haze. When she was very small a burning started in her eyes. When she rubbed them and cried out, her mother bathed them in geranium water because they couldn’t afford a doctor. By age seven Annie was legally blind, groping her way from place to place.

  She saw the world as matted, moving swirls of colors and gray. From the age of ten to fourteen she lived in the disreputable Tewksbury poorhouse. When a man from the welfare department came to inspect the poorhouse, Annie threw herself at him, saying, “I want to go to school.” He arranged for her to go to Perkins, where she learned to read and write completely at the age of fourteen; she graduated when she was twenty. During those years she had five operations at the charity hospital, and by her late teens she saw well enough to pass for sighted. Annie craved normality, and if she lost her sight again she’d lose everything, including me.

  “I can see perfectly,” Annie said. She nudged me to get up from my chair.

  I exhaled.

  “I can even see a liar a mile away.”

  I squirmed in my chair.

  “Come on. I’ll prove it to you.” She led me through the hall.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Your study. I’ve been looking through some letters.”

  “You were spying on me?”

  “Not spying. Investigating. And it’s Peter I’m after.”

  “Shouldn’t we respect his privacy?”

  “Respect this.” Annie plunked me into a mohair chair by my desk and rattled a letter in front of me. “It’s addressed to Peter. Get ready, Helen.”

  “Ready for what?”

  “To bid him good-bye.”

  “Don’t …” Whatever the letter said, I didn’t want to know. But Annie spelled rapidly into my hand:

  Miss Dorothy Eagan, 17 Eagleview Point, Albany, New York

  Peter Mine,

  I crave your scent on my hands. I crave your letters, asking what I’m wearing. I’ll tell you. I am wearing only desire for you.

  I need to see you. I’m coming to Boston next week. Can you meet me at the two o’clock train? Please wear your blue suit. You always look so handsome in blue.

  Yours deeply,

  Dorothy

  Annie and I sat together, her hand firm but nervous in mine.

  “So he really loves someone else,” Annie spelled.

  Fire, a roiling thing in me.

  “Your time with him is almost over.”

  “It’s not.” Deception comes to everyone sometimes. If I could deceive Annie and my own mother, there must be a reason why Peter would deceive me about another woman.

  “What’s the date on the letter?”

  “Helen, I’m sorry. He’s a charlatan. All men are. You have to face facts.”

  “Tell me the date. It may have been written before he met me.”

  “What?”

  “He can’t be involved with her. He’s—”

  “You should have believed me when I told you what John reported about him.”

  “Oh, Annie. You know John’s a liar.”

  “True.” Annie pulled back, and I felt her hands cool as she held mine, her whole self assessing me. “He was, is, a liar. But this letter, Helen, is incontrovertible proof.”

  “It proves nothing.”

  Annie smoothed my hair.

  “Helen,” Annie spelled softly. “He’s an opportunist. I asked him to clean out some of your old correspondence files last week; he pulled out a stack of letters from Mark Twain and said, ‘Did they correspond a lot?’ I told him Twain had loved you like a daughter until the day he died. Helen, remember having tea with him in New York? He even left whiskey for you in your room when we visited him at his Connecticut house, saying everyone needed a friend in the night.”

  “Yes.” Something was wrong. But I didn’t want Annie, or even myself, to know what it was. I nudged the bedroom floorboard with my shoe.

  “So the look in Peter’s eyes when he heard how close you were to Twain, well, I could just see him imagining himself flitting around with all the other people you know. Mark my words. He wants so much to be famous he’ll stick to you like glue.” She snapped her fingers so hard I felt the snap deep in my hand.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Helen. If you could have seen him, you’d agree.”

  I felt a bit of fear. Could I really know Peter without seeing? A blind man once said he didn’t want sight. He wanted longer arms. Arms so long that if he wanted to understand the moon, he would simply reach up and touch it: he would rather feel the moon than see it. So no, I didn’t need to see Peter: the hot skin of his neck, his mouth on mine, said all I needed to know.

  “People aren’t always what they seem,” I said.

  “Want to bet?” Annie spelled back, her hand still holding Dorothy Eagan’s letter. I steadied myself in my chair.

  “At least you’ll be rid of him,” Annie said a few minutes later. I sat so still in the chai
r. The air near her bed seemed dense. “Read me the date on the letter,” I said. “A date will tell me if it is recent or not.” Annie did not move.

  Another thing no one tells you about being blind is the utter dependency, the way I have to cajole, plead, persuade those around me to do the simplest things, like read me the date because I can’t do it myself. If Annie refuses, how can I know if Peter’s been deceiving me? It’s hard to believe how many of my desires I’ve had to bury, because they didn’t fit the whim of someone else. But it’s like I’ve caught a fever. I want to run away with Peter, and my hands shake uncontrollably.

  “The date,” I repeated.

  “It’s too light to see.”

  “Your vision is not the best,” I tried to joke.

  Annie coughed. “So true.”

  “It could be an old letter.”

  “And I could be President Wilson,” Annie said.

  My deepest regret? How easily I would have excused him for anything. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: there are so many, many ways to be blind.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  America’s First Lady of Courage. That’s how I am known, for my relentless fight for the deaf and blind. It’s true that I’ve crisscrossed the country tirelessly, that I’ve raised more money than anyone else, that I demand the same rights as anyone in the hearing and sighted world. But I can’t claim to be the First Lady of Courage. It took all the courage I had to walk away from Annie and find my way down the hall, alone.

  So I don’t remember the vibration of Peter’s footsteps, but he followed me into my study. I sat at my desk, my hands tracing the letter Annie showed me. Panic filled me, but I was determined to show Peter that I was strong. I won’t let anyone take my dignity, especially him. I hid the letter behind my back.

  “What do you have there?” He laughed, pulling my hand toward him.