Helen Keller in Love

Helen Keller
in Love

To my
husband, David Rudner, and our son, Gabriel Sultan,
who mean everything to me.
I am so blessed.

Helen Keller
in Love

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-one

Chapter Thirty-two

Chapter Thirty-three

Chapter Thirty-four

Chapter Thirty-five

Chapter Thirty-six

Chapter Thirty-seven

Chapter Thirty-eight

Chapter Thirty-nine

Chapter Forty

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Chapter One

I
wait
under a night sky pocked with stars I cannot see. I lean forward on the porch, the
chrr-chrr-chrr
of crickets thrums the warm air that vibrates against my skin; the wooden railing I hold feels cool after the day’s heat. The night around me is a bitter cup of ink, drained into my cells. Those weighty caverns of water under the earth—hungry mouths, waiting to take me in.

I cannot account for my behavior.

I have lied—to my teacher, my mother, the world. I hid from them the second miracle of my life this fall night of 1916. Because I have a secret.

I’ve never told this story. I don’t know if I can tell it now. But it’s a story I have kept out of all the speeches I’ve ever given and every one of the books I’ve written. Yet it’s the truest story I’ve lived.

Thirty-seven years old. Deaf, blind, mute. I have taken a lover, and I am in love. I can’t publicly marry because my teacher and my mother forbid it—it is their only hope of keeping me close.

But I defied them. I lied to Annie. I was tired of being perfect Helen Keller. Helen the pure; Helen the tireless worker, the saint, the good girl. I wanted to break free. And it happened very suddenly. Last summer I met a man who awoke all sorts of demons, mad cravings in me. A man who tasted like night.

Since October we’ve been secretly engaged. This is the night we will elope. I’m ready. Beside me sits my leather suitcase as I wait all through this steamy Alabama night on the porch of my sister Mildred’s house in Montgomery. I wait in silence—nothing new to me. But this silence, this dark, is not a casket; it is an opening. Life calls from the tangy woods at the edge of my sister’s house. Woods from which Peter will creep under cover of night, take my hand, and race me off to Florida, where a minister friend waits to marry us.

The night gets cooler around me, and the silence deeper. One hour, two, then four hours pass. Yet I know he will come. The people who know me best—Annie, my teacher; Mother, asleep on the second floor—could never have imagined I would deceive them, or marry and have someone to care for.

The longer I wait here the more the woods give off a vicious scent as morning breaks. I had crept out of my upstairs bedroom, suitcase in hand, at two a.m. and waited in the rocker by the piney railing for four hours, my listening feet pressed to the porch to feel the
thrum
,
thrum
,
thrum
of Peter’s footsteps.

I waited even as my sister Mildred heard me rocking, and got up. She woke her husband, who told her not to be afraid—it was only me on the porch: Sister Helen, he called me. They didn’t know I kept in communication with Peter Fagan; that I packed my leather bag and came down to wait for him as they slept. This is the story you will never read about in my books: how Helen Keller waited all night on this porch to elope with her lover.

Here’s the date I’ll never write: November 27, 1916. Did Peter sense trouble, and decide to stay away? Did Mildred’s husband pay him off? Or did the men come to blows in the woods? Did Peter fight back, push Mildred’s husband away, saying, “I must see Helen. She belongs with me?” Doesn’t he know I am waiting, will wait some more—will keep waiting even as this bitter sun rises—hoping to feel his footsteps on the stair? He must come.

Burning, the Alabama sun. People ask me: How can you tell the difference between night and day if you are blind? I tell them that night air is lighter; day feels heavier, more sodden with life. And as I stand up, pick up my suitcase, admit to myself that maybe my lover will not come, this air of daylight weighs more heavily on my skin than any blindness ever did.

My throat is a red knot, unraveling. I can’t go back in the house to Mother and Mildred. The sun rises like a plume of smoke, trailing until daybreak comes and the silence deepens more than any I have ever known.

I am alone. Still, he still may come … Because we had an extraordinary, passionate affair. When I think about it now, it makes my breath move fast, fast, like a train …

Chapter Two