“Scrubbed everything for you,” I tell Mr. Dickens. “Five floors. On my knees.” I had to help; Jeannette is such a terrible housekeeper that I find balls of dust whenever I check the floor in my room. I can’t see the dirt, but if you set me in a spot with a soapy rag and a bucket, I won’t move until you tell me it’s all spanking clean. I think one of the reasons Doctor keeps me in his apartment is because it would be a mess without me, and Doctor hates a mess, even more than Papa did. Miss Swift signs that it’s time for Doctor to give a speech.
And so from Mr. Dickens one last thing: “God bless you.”
“You also,” I write. Then he pats my head, and I try not to flinch, afraid a crinkled hair from his knuckle might slip into my braid like an old spider. I plaited my hair myself in one long braid wound tight in a circle at the back of my head. It’s very neat.
Miss Swift pulls a chair by mine and tells me that her hands are tired already, so she won’t be filling me in on Doctor’s speech, as she usually does. I don’t understand how she can be so tired when we haven’t even done much talking today, and heaven knows she never helps with the cleaning. I don’t really mind, though, because I’ve gotten the Exhibition speech a hundred times: charity; education; how Doctor founded Perkins ten years ago; how Doctor doesn’t like the Braille he saw in France and invented his own Boston type; and then he talks about me. I will sorely miss that part today.
I sit patiently in my chair until I feel the applause and I can tell everyone is rising to their feet, as they often do after Doctor, so I stand too. Then Doctor comes straight to my chair, but it pains me that he brings more guests, two stepping lightly who I know are women, and then one treading more heavily than a bear, Doctor’s closest friend, Charles Sumner. Sumner is too tall; even when he bends down, he’s my whole hand taller than Doctor. I was so scared of Doctor when he first came to see me in Hanover because he was the tallest person I had ever met until then. But I was only seven, so I didn’t know anything.
He introduces me to Misses Louisa and Julia Ward, sisters visiting from New York City, who are staying nearby in Dorchester. The Julia one is standing so close to Doctor that his sleeve grazes me when I reach for her hand.
“Lovely little girl,” Doctor says she called me, and then he is off to play with his other guests, leaving Miss Swift to translate.
The Miss Julia Ward is wearing a bracelet with huge triangles that feel like glass. “Diamonds?” I ask.
“Austrian crystals,” but they are sharper than the crystals in Jeannette’s jewelry. Maybe she is rich, like many people from New York.
I reach up to touch her hair. The women like me to play with their hair. They always invite me. Two long, crisp plumes stand straight on a tiny hat that feels like satin. It’s not a daytime hat; satin is what the ladies wear at night. And it has a jewel as well, a smooth, flat square. Definitely an evening hat. Her hair is pulled to the back much like mine, but I can still feel on the sides how silky it is—silkier than mine, thicker than mine or Swift’s or Jeannette’s or Tessy’s or Mama’s. I wonder if Doctor knows this. His own hair is almost that thick, and he isn’t missing any on the top like some men. There’s nothing more terrible than to explore a forehead only to find it goes on and on, especially if there are any tufted bits left sprouting like grass between stones. I check the front of Julia’s head, because women can sometimes be missing hair too, especially the old ones, but no, Julia has it all. I trail lightly down the curve of her cheek—I want to get to know her face better—but she suddenly leans away from me. Very rude.
“Excited for Oliver coming?” she asks.
“Who is Oliver?”
Miss Swift’s hand hesitates. “The one like you.”
She’s talking nonsense. I search the air in front of me for Doctor—where is Doctor? I stand and step on her foot. Sumner tugs at my upper arm, but I elbow him off and run through the room, cracking my knee against the corner of the chaise, grazing shoulders and backs as I circle toward the door, toward the bay window, the fireplace, and back again. Warm liquid spills down the front of my dress—someone’s tea, I suppose—and then I find Doctor’s coattail. He turns and shakes me by the shoulders, just like I’m trying to shake him, and then his hands go down and he writes on my wet palm, “Stop! Calm.” I am behaving like a wild animal, and making the noises of one too, coming deep from my chest. I let them rip.
“Who is Oliver?” I write.
“Hush.” He pats my back and guides me to a chair. “Little boy who is blind and deaf. Wonderful.”
“How old?”
“Eight.”
“Can taste and smell?”
“Yes. You’ll help teach.”
I shake my head.
“You’ll love him, Laura, as we love you.” I don’t think he understands me as well as I thought. He tells me that he’s off to town with Sumner and the Miss Wards.
He waits as I press my nails in. Miss Swift never lets them grow as long as I’d like; she cuts them every Monday morning.
“Let go. Now.”
I allow him to pry my hands from his, and he goes. The last of the footsteps thud away, but still I sit, not even in my visitor’s chair, but in a low, hard one by the bay window, letting the draft creep across my feet. I keep my hands shut, like a book with flat print that I’ll never be able to read, maybe one of Mr. Dickens’s, its pages filled with the joys and sorrows—no, the adventures—of someone like me. Oliver will come smelling flowers, sniffing Doctor’s coat, tasting peaches and custards and boiled sugar syrup and sausages and turtle soup. He won’t be like me. No one is like me. It’s really true, and I don’t know if that’s good or bad.
Chapter Two
Laura, 1843
“The two [Oliver and Laura] presented a singular sight; her face was flushed and anxious and her fingers twined in among ours so closely as to follow every motion…while Oliver stood attentive…then a smile came stealing out…and spread into a joyous laugh the moment he succeeded, and felt me pat his head, and Laura clap him heartily upon the back, and jump up and down in her joy.”
—Samuel Gridley Howe, “Tenth Annual Report of the Trustees of the Perkins Institution,” 1843
Doctor pulls me onto his lap in the leather chair by the fire after supper; he is wearing his flannel robe, and I am wearing mine, because a shiver of winter runs through our apartment. He takes a walnut from his pocket—he always keeps some there for me—and lets me squeeze the nutcracker as his hand waits below for the prize. No other nuts please me like this one: the shell is the hardest to crack, and the meat is deeply ridged, each half different. Doctor says they are shaped like tiny brains, and like the nuts, each brain is different. Phrenology, the study of the bumps on the skull, is Doctor’s favorite hobby, but he tells me that I am too young to learn it yet. He drops the nut into my open mouth. That is our agreement—if he lets me open them, I have to eat them—but tonight, he gives in, as he sometimes does, and takes the other half I tap against his teeth. He allows my fingers to travel over the face I know as well as my own: the strong, wide brow and bushy eyebrows; the straight perfection of his nose between the deep-set eyes; the bristly fur of mustache half covering his upper lip. And his beard, Doctor’s beard—I could spend an hour curling each hair around my finger.
“Enough,” he signs on the hand he pulls from his whiskers. “Oliver is coming tomorrow.” I write nothing, as if I have no concerns. “Spending the night in town before they deliver him.”
My parents did not deliver me to Doctor; he came to Hanover and took me. Papa did not even walk us out to the carriage; his last touch was when he pried my fingers from the doorframe.
“Your blue dress,” Doctor says. I am dressing for a blind? “Invited the newspapers.”
“Oliver isn’t famous.” Not yet, anyway.
“Historic, your meeting.”
“Like you and Longo?” The first time Longfellow and Doctor met, they talked for eight hours straight.
“No,” he writes. “A mee
ting between two of God’s best creatures.”
The newspapers are not coming because Oliver and I are two of God’s best creatures, I know that. “Like General Tom Thumb and the Feejee Mermaid?”
He puts another walnut in my hand, and together, we crack it open. “You hurt my heart,” he writes. “Barnum is a showman.”
He sits so far back in his chair that I almost fall off his knee. I lift his hand from the arm of the chair to write my “sorry,” but he balls both hands into fists. We sit still together for a moment, as we often do, but this time the stillness is full of Doctor’s disappointment. He lets me uncurl one fist: “I will help with Oliver.” He pulls me close to him then, my head settling in the familiar nook between his neck and shoulder, and I am his own little mermaid again, swimming in his warm waters.
The hall is crowded. The boy has come. For once, I try to stay back, invisible, leaning against the cold marble. Miss Swift writes that Doctor is pointing out the luxuries of our new Institution: the long, curving stairways; the carpeted, high-ceilinged rooms (Swift says you could stack five of me and still not touch the chandeliers). It’s so fancy because it used to be the Mount Washington House Hotel. My first years, we were still in Mr. Perkins’s house downtown on Pearl Street, but now here we are on Bird Lane in South Boston overlooking the bay. What a world away, Doctor tells the crowd, from the nearby House of Industry for Paupers and Orphans and the Boylston School for Neglected and Indigent Boys.
I figure he’ll go on for hours with such an audience, but then Swift tugs me forward. Doctor writes “Oliver” and then places the boy’s fingers on my eyeshade, and on my ears, and then upon his own. I can’t tell from the child’s movements if he understands anything at all—who knows? And then, without warning, Doctor pushes me smack into the boy’s chubby arms, our faces so close that I feel the air sucked quickly in and out of his nostrils as he sniffs me. It is violent, it is rude, but still I wish I had that talent. I do not struggle, but I do not embrace him, either; I hold myself up as tall as I can, and I am taller than he is, his bangs swishing against my cheek. I tense as Doctor lifts my arms, but allow him to put them around the boy. It’s like holding one of Cook’s potato rolls risen with too much yeast and come to life. His hair is as downy as a girl’s one hour out of the bath.
Suddenly, he drops to the floor, and I am afraid he is after my shoes, but he scuttles away from me. There is a jarring, and then Doctor pulls him up beside me, and everyone is jostled about. I search for Swift’s hand, and she says that Oliver felt the warm air blowing from the grate of the furnace beneath his feet and knelt to inspect it with his tongue. It’s true that there are no furnaces like the one Doctor had built especially for us, but it is not worth licking. I can’t stop laughing; I don’t care if his parents hear me. I was worried about a boy, and here they have brought me only a dog to play with. That’s good then! I have long wanted a pet, as long as he is not too hard to clean up after. Poor Doctor—I wish I could see his face—does he show the embarrassment I am certain he is feeling?
He has recovered, though, and he puts my hand in Oliver’s. I don’t resist my pet. The fat, little fingers grip mine, and he trots forward, pulling me with him down the long marble hall, though of course he has no idea where he’s going. He is off exploring the walls, the floors, jerking me this way and that, and he shakes with laughter at everything. Is Doctor sure the boy is not an idiot? No one in his right mind could possibly be this jolly about touching doors and walls. I remember the great terror that seized me when I first arrived, when everything and everyone was new and strange, and I had no way to know any of it, for good or for ill, except through my fingers. But Oliver doesn’t even tremble, except occasionally with delight. Maybe he is not afraid of anything because his parents are here with him. Does he know they are going to abandon him within hours?
Swift and Doctor rein him in, and they are now beginning the official tour. Swift says they’ll start with the boys’ dining room. I rush ahead to brush each of the six long wooden tables for crumbs. I wonder if I should check with Cook to make sure she is presentable, if Doctor decides to show the kitchen. Thank goodness Oliver is a boy, and won’t be at the table snuffling through his food between me and Tessy. Next I throw open the heavy doors of the gymnasium, and spread my arms wide so the visitors can take in everything: the climbing ropes, the ladders, the yardarms, and mats. Even the director of the Pennsylvania Institution for the Blind was shocked at the wonder Doctor created for us, and how rough-and-tumble we play in it. I’m not big, but I can wrestle most of the older girls to the ground, though I have been barred from such play temporarily for biting. I have excellent teeth. The people are moving around the room, and I would climb the rope all the way up for them and pose in the warmth of the sunshine from the top dormers if I had on my romp skirt and tights.
Doctor is behind me, his pocket watch thrumming through his waistcoat against my back as he presses close. “Tell the gentlemen from the Herald and the Evening Transcript what you think of Oliver.”
Doctor offers me the slate to write on because there are too many hands to talk to, and I freeze: he is a dog, he is a dog is all I can think. Puppy? No, he is a boy, a good boy—what did Doctor say? He is a creature, he is God’s creature. I remember something Swift’s brother was going on about last week, and I think it might sound nice. “Oliver is the lamb of God,” I write in big letters, and hold the board up for all to see. The floor vibrates—not applause, it seems, but low laughter—and Doctor grabs the board. I don’t understand. Lambs are sweet and gentle; it is a much greater compliment than the boy deserves. Swift stops me as I try to go upstairs with the group. I know Doctor will be showing the students’ rooms in the boys’ wing, and I want to see if Oliver gets a room by himself like mine in Doctor’s apartment.
“Doctor wants you to stay,” she writes.
“Why?” I know I did nothing wrong, yet there is a little burr of worry beneath my skin.
“Wrong to call Oliver lamb of God.”
“Everyone likes.”
“Not a real lamb,” she writes. “Bible symbol for…”
I wait, but she doesn’t continue. Swift does not communicate well, like Doctor or like me. “Give me Bible like the blinds. I’ll learn it.”
Swift holds my hand more gently. “I try, but Doctor says no.”
I won’t be able to wait much longer, because God is the one person in the whole world that I have the most questions for.
True to my word, I am helping Miss Swift attempt to teach Oliver, but he is a very dull scholar, just as I forecast. A hundred times a day for the last month, I have moved his fingers from the metal raised-type labels for fork, spoon, and pen to the actual items, and back again. A few times he has been able to imitate my motions, but then he seems to forget and goes back to his fidgets. Doctor says that within two weeks, I’d already matched the labels of over fifty objects and was on to arranging the individual letters into words. Oliver didn’t come down with the fever until he was three and a half, more than a year after I did, so Doctor thinks he should remember more from what he heard and saw. He was talking a blue streak by then, his parents said, and yet all he does now is make pantomime gestures. He finally does understand that, like him, I can’t see or hear, so he pats my hand or my face when he wants my attention. He has different pats for good, bad, stop, and hungry. I am sure he will never learn real finger spelling. At first I didn’t like it myself, but then Doctor told me that each handshape not only represents a letter of the alphabet, but also stands for a particular prayer taken from a book written by a Spanish monk over three hundred years ago. If a monk was too sick to recite a prayer, then he would just make the handshape for it. I like to think I am constructing words and sentences out of prayers, though I am still not sure that God receives them.
Doctor worked with us the first weeks, but then he got frustrated with Oliver, and now he’s gone to New York to raise money for the school. That’s what he says, anyway, but I know he is vis
iting with Julia Ward. He used to say that New York City was only fit for vermin, but last week he didn’t laugh when I made a rat joke about the Ward sisters. He has made more trips there in the last months—four, to be exact—than he has ever made before. “Are you counting?” Jeannette asked me, and I said, “Yes, ma’am, I am.”
Before he left, Doctor told me that he is impressed, however, with how Oliver is taking to workshop with the other boys; he has already woven one manila doormat and is working on a basket. I wish the girls got to go all the way to the East Fourth Street workshop every afternoon, walking holding hands along the water. I would tie the biggest, most comfortable mattress in the world for Doctor, and beat all the boys at chair-caning too. Instead, I must stay here with the blind girls knitting and sewing, washing and ironing, until supper at six. Those things are better practice to fit us to be good wives and mothers, I’m told. We are kept from the boys—or more likely, them from us—for everything except assemblies. I have only had occasion to meet with them then, and I am pleased with our separation because their touch is rough and their fingers grimy. Only Oliver is allowed to mix with us girls, and I help keep him very clean, going over his face and hands regularly with a wet rag.
Of course, I have my Laura dolls to practice mothering, all ten of them, the twelve-inch likenesses of me that are sold across the country, with their eyes poked out and little green grosgrain ribbons tied over the eyeholes. I sent Mama one for my baby sister Mary, and Mama wrote that the doll looks just like me. Pretty, Mama said, and well-formed. It is such a treat to touch myself, to run my fingers down my tiny nose and up and down my smooth legs beneath the dress. I wish that the fingers bent so we could have conversations, though I know they wouldn’t be real. Still I write in my favorite Laura’s hand sometimes, secrets and stories. I know which one she is because she is the only one whose hair I wrap up in a bun and tie with ribbon like a lady’s; the rest have hair that hangs loose and straight down their back like mine. I can’t wait till I can twirl it back and carry it on top of my head like Julia’s. I used to let some of the older girls hold tea with me and all the Lauras, but then last month after tea with several of the girls and their dolls, I did the count and there were only nine Lauras. I understand the others would be jealous not just because I have more dolls than they do—most have only one—but that my face is so famous that little girls everywhere want to play with me. To show that I am generous, I gave Tessy a Laura on the condition that she not change her name and that she sleep with her every night. Sometimes I sleep with Tessy too, a Laura nestled between us. Every night before I go to bed, I brush each one’s hair with a miniature brush the mayor’s wife gave me, and on waking, I smooth their long white dresses. I ask Swift if any of their dresses are dirty from sitting on top of the armoire, even though I dust them with a feather duster every week, but she always says no. She’s just lazy and doesn’t want to help me with them. Swift asked if Oliver could join Tessy and me at doll tea on Sundays, but I said, “Of course not, he’s a boy, he might break them.” I am their mother, so I am responsible for their well-being.
What Is Visible: A Novel Page 2