Doc swabbed the wound liberally with alcohol. “I must caution you that this will hurt. If you will recite a forgotten poem in your mind, the mental effort will help to take your mind off the pain.”
She could not recall a poem without picturing Marie practicing her elocution lessons. “Just get it over with.” She looked away and felt the pressure of Doc’s hand gripping hers, then the cut. Pain caused her to grit her teeth and produced an unwanted quiver in her privates. Her free hand gripped the table edge.
“I am sorry.” He squeezed the wound to expel the pus and flushed it with hydrogen peroxide. “Puncture wounds are tricky. They want to heal over on the surface before the wound has a chance to heal underneath, so they fester. Do not bandage it. Allow air to get to it, and keep it cleansed with hydrogen peroxide.”
She thanked him and picked up her handbag and satchel. He opened the door for her, but she pushed it shut and turned back toward him.
“I shall be blunt,” she said. “If there is anything between you and Irina, I plan to tell her you’re a carrier . . .”
“Stop, now, Louise. My intentions are nothing but honorable. I made it clear to her the loss of my wife had rendered me unable to love another woman.”
“I don’t remember you being especially fond . . .”
Scalpel in hand, he puffed up like a cornered animal, chest heaving and eyes flashing. “Do not presume to know my feelings for my late wife.”
As though embarrassed by his menacing stance, he turned, picked up a towel, and wiped the scalpel in a slow, deliberate manner, placed it in a tray, and dropped the towel in a hamper. “My wife was an extraordinary woman once. It was my fault we became estranged. I infected her, just as I infected you. I have been celibate since I first saw Marie. I vowed I would never endanger another woman . . . or blind another child.”
“Tell me something.” Louise tried in vain to steady her trembling voice. “I have to know. Why did you fail to inform me that you had gonorrhea and fail to treat Marie?”
His face sagged. “I did treat Marie, but─”
“Don’t weasel out of this. It was too late. Her eyes were already infected.”
“I had a bout of it once—”
Louise slammed her handbag on the examining table. “But you’re a doctor! You knew you might still be a carrier. I want to know why a doctor, one who prides himself on being progressive, would knowingly expose women to gonorrhea.”
“It’s because I am a doctor. I convinced myself I could manage the risks. I knew that once infected there was a possibility, not a certainty, mind you, that I would continue to carry the germ. It was not until my wife became ill that I knew I was a carrier. I begged her to have surgery, but she refused. Scar tissue from the disease made her infertile, and she suffered chronic pain. She hated me for infecting her. She felt cheated by not having children and eventually gave up on life.”
“And you infected me.”
“I loved you.” His usually resonant voice became thin and nasal, the sound of a man desperate to defend the indefensible. “The truth is I wanted you so badly. The risk—the day your husband summoned me, when I saw Marie’s eyes, I knew you were infected. That is why I wanted you to get under a doctor’s care right away.”
Louise resented his trying to shift blame to her. “Why would I? For the longest time I had no idea I was sick until I started having unbearable pain. I ended up having surgery for pelvic inflammatory disease. Even then I didn’t know the cause. It wasn’t until I learned the cause of Marie’s blindness that─”
Doc frowned and shook his head. “Before I left your home that day, I talked to your housekeeper. I told her to give you a message, that you must see a woman’s doctor in Omaha as soon as you were fit to travel. I tried to impress upon her that it was very important.”
“Henryetta?” Louise recalled the days after Marie’s birth, drifting in and out of a fog. She had not even been aware that Doc had examined her and Marie until Frank told her later. No one had given her a message from Doc.
He looked away as though scanning his memory. “A little, stout woman with strings on her fingers.”
“Henryetta. What did she do when you told her?”
“She said she would tell you.”
“Did she tie a string on another finger?”
“No.”
“Are you certain? You didn’t see her reach in her apron pocket for a string?”
“No. I remember the scene as though it were yesterday. When I entered the kitchen, she was putting a handful of meat through the grinder, she picked up another handful and scarcely looked up. She was so intent on grinding that meat, looked like she planned to make hash, that I thought she might have been too distracted to apprehend my words so I repeated myself.”
“She forgot. That’s why she didn’t tell me.”
Doc’s face contorted in anguish. “Louise, I am truly sorry. I should have made certain you saw a specialist. I loved you, yet I acted the coward at your expense.”
“You loved me? You made me believe we would go away together and start a new life—”
“Which I wanted more than you will ever know.”
“Then why did you abandon me?”
“Not because I wanted to. I had a duty to care for my wife. You did not need me. She did.”
“What about Marie? Had you informed me of the danger, had you instilled drops when she was born instead of waiting―”
“I was like everyone else in my profession, which I know is not an excuse. We knew the efficacy of prophylaxis, but we failed to act on what we knew. I am ashamed to say it, but I gambled with your life and Marie’s sight.”
“You knew and you gambled. How could you?”
Doc slumped, and his head turned from side to side. “I meant to end our liaison after our first encounter, but I lacked the will.” Seeming to realize his admissions were out of character, he snapped to a confident pose. His voice took on a defensive tone. “You know yourself that even though a woman may have gonorrhea, it does not inevitably blind her newborn baby. Quite the contrary. Infection develops in just a small percentage of cases. I have witnessed just two in the last ten years, yet the number of women in Riverbend with active or latent gonorrhea is legion. When I told you there might be a medical complication, I was being selfish. To be honest, I considered your having a baby a personal complication for me. My words were intended to get you to abort. I didn’t think for one minute that the baby would be infected. Now you no doubt wonder why I support the campaign. It’s because of Marie. She taught me humility.”
He reached for her hand, but she withdrew it.
“Louise, I cannot be so bold as to ask your forgiveness.”
“Marie taught you humility? You saw this pathetic little baby lying in her crib, her eyes oozing pus, and you went away with a lesson in humility. Do you know what Marie taught me? I lived with her every day and witnessed her valiant attempts to thrive in a sighted world to which she would never belong, and I got a daily lesson in God’s wrath, that I had betrayed my husband and blinded my precious daughter. Marie taught me that every day was God’s punishment for loving you.”
Hearing her own shrill voice, bent on bludgeoning Doc with words, Louise felt possessed. Rarely had she expressed herself without regard for behavior unbecoming a lady, and it left her raw and exposed.
As she reached for her handbag, her injured hand struck the counter. She ignored the pain. “Don’t fool yourself into thinking that I still love you. The campaign needs you.”
34
February 1907
In Omaha for a labor reform meeting, Helen Keller committed two days to the Nebraska campaign. People who had closed their doors to Louise opened them wide for the chance to meet Helen. With interpreting assistance from Annie, the women addressed a meeting of the Visiting Nurses Association, met with the executive board of the Federation of Women’s Clubs, and received a most encouraging response from the dean and faculty of the School of Nursing at the Unive
rsity of Nebraska Medical School.
Now, at the end of a long day, Louise sat with Helen in the parlor of the Victoria Hotel suite Helen shared with Annie, who was napping. Louise had thought Helen must be wealthy until learning that the luxurious accommodations were provided by her sometimes benefactor, Andrew Carnegie, whose admiration for Helen exceeded his loathing of her socialist ideals.
The parlor was two different worlds. One belonged to Louise for whom it held sensual pleasures: marble fireplace, polished brass lamps, crystal chandelier, damask wall covering in ruby red and forest green, gold brocade draperies, and overstuffed mahogany furniture. The crackle of the fire, the bump of logs, and the chatter of sleet on the windowpanes. In Helen’s presence Louise’s senses became more acute, not to be taken for granted, a guilty indulgence.
The other world belonged to Helen for whom it parceled out minimal sensual cues to differentiate it from any other place: the fragrance of flowers; the feel of crushed velvet upholstery; the warmth from the fireplace on her hands and face in contrast to the chilly draft on her neck; the vibrations of footsteps, bumping logs, or closing doors. Helen was trapped in a world she called her “prison of darkness and silence.”
The friendship that began after Marie’s death had deepened with Louise’s determination to bridge the chasm of Helen’s deafness and blindness. Few people could understand Helen’s slurred speech, and even fewer bothered to learn her tactile sign language.
Helen spoke, breaking Louise’s reverie. “Annie tells me that when you were asked the cause of Marie’s blindness by a board member of the Federation of Women’s Clubs, you said it was a pnuemococcal infection.”
Whether expressing delight or anger, Helen’s voice was an undulating falsetto, hard to read. But now everything in her posture and demeanor said “judgmental.” “But it wasn’t pneumococcus.”
Louise signed into Helen’s hand. “What are you getting at?”
“Marie’s eyes were once described to me. I understand your wanting to protect your reputation, but honesty and trust are cornerstones of friendship. I regard your stubborn insistence that Marie was not blinded by gonorrhea as an impediment to our friendship. Come now, Louise, there’s no shame in having been the innocent agent who carried the blinding infection.”
Louise resented the invasion of privacy and had no intention of setting the record straight. There were things a woman should keep to herself that Helen did not seem to appreciate. Helen was fifteen years younger, and moreover emboldened by the influence of Annie and her husband, John, and their freethinking intellectual friends. Her hand shook as she signed, “How would you like it if I pried into your private life?”
“There’s precious little left of my private life,” Helen said. “Rumors about my shared living arrangement with the Macys. The press report when Peter Fagan and I secured a marriage license last year.”
“Yes. I knew, of course. I’m so sorry. I read that your family intervened.” Louise was being tactful. In fact, Helen’s brother-in-law ran Fagan off with a shotgun, and on another occasion Helen’s mother abducted her to keep her from meeting him.
“What the press didn’t know is that Peter and I continued to communicate. We had a secret place where we left notes. We planned to elope. I sneaked down to the porch during the night and sat until morning with my packed bag. He never arrived, and I never heard from him again.”
Louise’s throat tightened. Of all the stories of love pursued and lost—the Indian maiden leaping from a cliff to join her beloved brave in death, lovers separated by race or religion or oceans─the pathos they aroused paled against the image Louise held of this young deaf and blind woman sitting on a porch throughout the night with her packed suitcase. Waiting with just a few material possessions, willing to break with her family and Annie, intoxicated with the anticipation of being spirited away by her lover. Time passes. Doubt creeps in. Then dread, as it becomes certain he will never appear.
Louise tried to steady her hand as she signed in Helen’s palm, “Do you know what happened?”
“No. Perhaps he recognized the burden of caring for a deaf and blind wife. And I came to regret the pain I caused my mother. I cannot account for my behavior. I seem to have acted exactly opposite to my nature.”
Louise squeezed Helen’s hand before responding. “You are not alone. I was so in love once that I became a person I scarcely recognized. Do you regret the romance?”
“I am glad that I have had the experience of being loved and desired. The fault was not in the loving but in the circumstances. But we digress. Why will you not state the obvious?”
“Where I come from, masking one’s true nature is a virtue.”
A knock on the door saved Louise. She signed, “Room service is here.”
A taxi ride through heavy sleet took Louise and Helen to their last appointment, a meeting with Sen. Mortimer Phillips of Omaha, chairman of the legislature’s powerful Ways and Means Committee. Nearly a year had passed since Louise had first attempted to get the attention of the legislature with her letter to Sen. Adolph Bruegger, and subsequent letters and petitions had brought only terse replies. Doc had once had a meeting with some senators, set up by an influential medical colleague. It resulted in a polite brush-off. But with the mention of Helen’s name, Louise found Sen. Phillips eager to meet.
He greeted them in the sparsely furnished office of his company, which manufactured farm implements. At first he mistook Louise for Annie. Louise explained that Mrs. Macy was in the hotel room getting some much-needed rest.
He pumped Helen’s hand. “My stock went up with my wife and daughter when I told them I was meeting with you today.”
He beckoned them to join him at a window that overlooked the manufacturing floor.
As they approached the window, Helen became visibly distressed. Being extremely sensitive to vibrations, she flinched at all the factory noises. Louise began to think it had been a mistake coming here. She took Helen’s hand and signed a description of workers carrying materials to men who stood at giant saws and presses turning out parts that all came together to make plows and harvesters. After a bit, Helen seemed to grow accustomed to the commotion and calmed down.
Louise continued to sign, interpreting the Senator’s words. “What you’re witnessing is not merely a manufacturing operation.” Sen. Phillips’ big voice carried over the rumbling from the plant below. “What you’re seeing is the marriage of two great industries, agriculture and manufacturing, the industries that are building America. Mark my words, one day this upstart country will be the envy of the world.”
He dragged two straight-back chairs toward his metal desk, a catch-all for papers, a camera, lunchpail, and greasy machine parts. “Please have a seat, ladies.”
Sen. Phillips talked at length about important matters facing the Ways and Means Committee and the various interests competing for limited resources. Almost without taking a breath, he launched into a rant about the demands of serving the citizens of Nebraska and their lack of appreciation. When he griped that he received a mere pittance for his efforts, that he served out of a selfless sense of duty, Louise nudged Helen with her knee as she signed, “It’s an effort not to laugh.”
Helen smiled.
He boasted that the Nebraska Legislature prided itself on keeping a balanced budget. He said the legislature’s commitment to agricultural and industrial growth would bring prosperity to all Nebraskans, including the blind. “Rising waters lift all ships.”
Finally he gave Louise and Helen an opportunity to speak. Louise interpreted for Helen, who laid out the need for state-mandated drops to protect all newborn babies. “Senator Phillips,” Helen said, “do you insure your factory against possible destruction by fire or some other catastrophic event?”
“Yes, of course. I’m a prudent man.”
“You would say it is prudent to pay a minuscule fraction of the property’s worth to protect yourself against the cost of replacing it even though the risk of catastrophe i
s slight. What we’re proposing is a plan to protect the state’s coffers by making a small investment against the known risk of blindness. If a tithe of the money we now spend to support unnecessary blindness were spent to prevent it, the state would be the gainer in terms of cold economy, not to speak of considerations of happiness and humanity. The citizens of Nebraska are fortunate to have your stewardship of their hard-earned tax dollars. They will see the wisdom of investing in prevention to save money over the long term.”
Louise was impressed with Helen’s carefully targeted message. If anything could move this man, it was an appeal to his thrifty nature.
The senator looked at his pocket watch. “I assure you that at such time a bill would come before the Ways and Means Committee, it would be given full consideration.” He stood.
The women remained seated. Louise said, “With all due respect, Senator, it was our hope that you would sponsor a bill.”
“Sen. Adolph Bruegger. He’s your man.”
“Anyone else?”
“A bill of that nature requires Bruegger’s blessing.”
Louise signed, “I’ve come full circle. He advises talking to the chairman of the Health and Welfare Committee who has already turned down several requests. I apologize for wasting your time.”
Sen. Phillips took the camera from his desk and handed it to Louise. “Do you know how to use a Kodak?”
“Yes.”
“Good. We’ll go down to the loading dock where there’s ample light. I have a favor to ask of Miss Keller.” He opened a desk drawer and produced a copy of Helen’s book, The Story of My Life. “My daughter wrote a book report and got the highest mark of anyone in her class. Would you ask Miss Keller if she would be so kind as to autograph this?”
35
October 1907
Compromise with Sin Page 27