Helen Keller in Love (25 page)

“Helen, that’s not true. Annie’s never gotten over John leaving.”

“Fine. But you said yesterday to always stick to your story, and that’s mine. She loved her husband, she tried, and it—”

“Crashed and burned.” Peter stacked the small suitcase atop the trunk.

“She had no regrets,” I said.

When Peter turned to the hall telephone to order Annie’s cab, I stood alone on the rug, my fingers moving as if repeating my words. But when Peter hung up, recrossed the hall, and took my hands, he held them so tight, I couldn’t say a thing.

Chapter Thirty-three

B
ooks are the eyes of the blind, I wrote in one of my publications. But nothing I ever read gave me instructions, a manual, on how a woman like me breaks away from her family to start a new life. I had only my desperation to get away, my craving for Peter, my foolish belief that I could have everything normal women had.

Peter released my hands. “Annie’s asleep, your mother’s napping, too. Helen, I want to be alone with you one more time before we marry. Come to my place this afternoon. We’ll have an hour alone, maybe two. We’ll be back for dinner …”

“No.” I backed away. “I’m too nervous.”

“Come on. We can practice our lines in the car. I’ll say, ‘I, Peter Fagan, do take thee, Helen Adams Keller …’”

“I know my lines. Let’s practice something else.” I leaned over and kissed him.

“Ah, a girl after my own heart.” He led me across the kitchen, out the back door, and down the steps. I couldn’t wait for him to open the car door and start the engine; I couldn’t wait to be alone with him, as if it were the first time.

At Peter’s house something inside me tipped and spun. The cool scent of fresh water filled the air when we walked in the front door. “Oh, perfect.” Peter dropped my hand. “Just what I need. Instead of seducing you, it looks like I’ll be repairing a broken water pipe instead.” Peter plopped me into a chair by the front window. “Water’s spurting from the damned pipe, all over the floor.” In moments I felt a
chut-chut-chut
as Peter dragged a wooden ladder across the floor. “Damned cheap house. Flimsy construction. There’s a leak in the back hallway, and no one to fix it. This place was probably a slave shack before Annie rented it for me.”

“We citizens
of Massachusetts never owned slaves.”

“You sure did. Whole packs of them in the 1600s and 1700s.”

“Well,
I
personally never owned slaves.”

“Come on, Miss Born-in-Alabama. The Keller family churned out Southern cotton for centuries. They must have had the help of slaves. Or do I have my history wrong?”

He didn’t wait for an answer. He just propped the ladder against the wall and climbed the teetery rungs. I held the ladder in place with all my strength.

I don’t see black, white, or even gray, but I’ve known from a young age that nothing is simple, or clear-cut. Everything has its price. “Did the Keller family own slaves?” Annie asked my father when I was eight. Every night in the Tuscumbia dining room Annie threw herself into a pitched battle with my father about the Civil War. “Yankee horse thief,” my father ranted at Annie, refusing to answer. “Coming down here and criticizing our way of life. Why don’t you go back where you came from?” He shook his fist at her.

“Fine,” Annie said. “I can’t wait to be back where people are treated with dignity.”

“Dignity?” my father said, as Annie quickly spelled his words into my palm. “You’re telling me the North treats its people better than the South does? Listen to me,
Miss
Sullivan. It is Miss, isn’t it?”

“You know it is,” Annie snapped back.

“Well, Miss Sullivan, we
may
have owned slaves, but we didn’t send our white girls, our white women, out to
work
.” He said this last word as if it hurt.

I sat
by Annie, quivering.

“You think work is a dirty word?” Annie said. “Look around at all your finery. Maybe you didn’t work for this, but back in your father’s generation some slaves on the Keller plantation certainly did. Why don’t you acknowledge that all you have came from the backs of slave labor?
Slaves
made your life of leisure possible. Yes, Captain Keller, I work.
I
don’t depend on the labor of others to support me.”

My father waited a long time to answer. Then he said, “Why, Miss Sullivan, we lost our money after the Civil War. But the little that’s left, yes, some of it came from the old slave-owning days of the South. And that’s what makes your paycheck so fat.”

Annie said nothing.

“So tell me, Miss Sullivan. Do you still think you’re so almighty free?”

I remember Annie shaking with rage in the dining room. Part of her salary, or at least the home she lived in with me, came from a past of which she wanted no part. But since that day, I’ve understood that nothing is black or white.

I was still holding the ladder. “Peter, we have only an hour together here. Why don’t you come down? Call a plumber, that’s what Annie and I do when there’s a leak.”

“Numbers. I want numbers,” Peter climbed down and took my hand. “How many times in the past year, when you and Annie didn’t have two nickels to rub together, did you call some poor soul to fix something in that rattletrap house?”

“I don’t know. Five, maybe ten times.”

“And how many times did they get paid?”

“Peter.”

“Don’t ‘Peter’ me.” He pushed the ladder away and held my hands. “You know as well as I do that Annie either charmed them into doing the job for free or tossed their bills in the trash when they left. Am I
right?”

“Peter, you know the answer. But I’m glad she did. Have you seen the bill for Annie’s trip to Puerto Rico? She refused to go to that sanatorium in New York. She’s rented a cottage outside San Juan, where she says she can rest. So she’ll need to pay for the ship, a car, a room, and food for three to six months.”

“One thing about being blind, no one ever tells you the cost.”

“On the contrary. I know the cost of everything.” Maybe that’s why the idea of having a child frightened me less than it did Peter. I had my principles, but blind and deaf, totally dependent on others for my life, my sustenance, I knew that nothing came without a price. And I was willing to pay it. If I had to take more money from Carnegie to support myself and this child, well, I would swallow hard and do it.

Peter led me toward his bedroom. “Helen, you’re one of the lucky few who make money, and even luckier still because you’re about to marry a great guy like me.” He shut the door to his room and pulled me to him. “But, Helen, tell me. Just how many deaf-blind women have kids?”

“What?”

“You heard me. How many women just like you—deaf, blind, unable to get around on her own, dependent on a surly teacher—”

“Peter—”

“Or a handsome man to take her around all day and night—how many of those women have kids?”

“Do I look like a walking encyclopedia of the blind?”

“No. You look like a woman who’s been dropping hints right and left about children. The day Annie ransacked John’s apartment and brought home that baby stroller, I remember you said, ‘Peter, what if someday you and I …’ You didn’t finish the sentence, but I’m a word man, remember? I filled in the blank. ‘Had a baby’ is what you meant. So what’s really going on, missy? Anything I’m missing?” He leaned against the door.

“Peter.
The only thing you’re missing is the chance to unlace my dress.”

“Like this?” He slid his fingers inside my dress.

“Yes.”

“And this?” He pulled my dress up over my head, and kneeled down. I arched my back, and he pulled me closer. The warmth of his mouth on the inside of my thighs made me gasp, then I felt his warm breath at the very center of me.

He wrote on my thighs, “This is how fingerspelling was invented.”

“For monks to talk during holy hour,” I spelled on his neck, his curly hair in my hands. “They didn’t want to break their vow of silence.”

He slid his mouth closer, and I arched my whole body back and eased him into me. “How would you feel about having a baby with me?” I spelled impetuously into his hand. But he didn’t listen, he pressed his hips to mine and the world fell away again.

Later he rolled to the farthest edge of the bed. I stiffened as I lay beside him, afraid of what he’d say. “Helen, I heard you.”

“So, what if I were pregnant … someday?” I said.

“That would be an unwanted complication.” He gave off the scent of a metallic fence, part seaweed, pulling him out to sea. “We can’t afford—”

“Can’t afford what? The farmhouse is on the market. And Andrew Carnegie sends my pension every month. I told him to keep sending it.”

“You did that? Even when you knew I was against it? Well then I’ll let you in on some news
you
won’t like, either. Did you know that the
New York Times
returned my article about shell shock? They hire prominent journalists, not stringers like me.”

“Peter,
you know I publish there; I could have gotten you in.”

“Don’t you get it, Helen? I’m not going to ask you. Not ever. If we have a child we will have nowhere to live, and little money at all.”

I moved closer to him, breathing heavily.

“I thought you wanted a child,” I said.

“Yes, but not
now
.” Something jittery, wrong in his palm. “I’m still draft age, I could be drafted—President Wilson will be calling up troops to fight this war.”

“You want a baby,” I repeated. “Just not now, or not with me.”

My own voice seeped out. Loose like rolling pebbles. I was talking to him, unsure if my speaking voice was pitching up, or down, raw as I was.

He said nothing. I fished in the air for him, my hands touching pockets of emptiness.

All the air left the room. At that moment I understood Annie’s self-hatred, sharp as a knife.
I was an unexpected complication
. He did not want a baby, or did not want one with me. Deep inside my body, I felt a tell-tale, familiar cramping.

“I’m not saying never.” Peter took my hand. “Just not now.”

I pulled my hand away and made a fist.

Peter did not reach for me.

The whole long minute we sat in silence.

“We have a lot to do before tomorrow.” He stood up and left the room. I felt the
ssssup, ssssup
of his bare feet on the pine floor.

I got up, slipped on my dress. Peter was in the kitchen making coffee. I sat on the edge of the bed and put on my shoes. The silence around me was deeper than any silence in my thirty-seven years.

Chapter Thirty-four

A
s if nothing was wrong, I followed the scent of Peter’s cherry tobacco into the kitchen and sat at the table in the corner. Outside a truck rumbled up the road, and the heat of the overhead lamp warmed me, but the heaviness of Peter’s footsteps as he rapped across the floor by the stove told me he ached to leave.

So I ran my fingernail over the table’s soft wood, and then I rubbed my eyes. Rubbed as if to erase an old, piercing pain, like I was going blind for a second time. But I could not stop what was happening. All I knew was that Peter had teased me into life; I was alive and vulnerable. I could not go back. So I approached Peter, but as I got close enough to feel his warmth the telephone rang. Within seconds Peter hung up. “Just what we need. Your mother is hopping mad. I’m to get you home, now.”

“Is it Annie? She’s worse?” I pulled my coat around me.

“Something tells me Annie’s just fine—ready to head off to Puerto Rico to heal on your dime. No, the contempt in your mother’s voice means only one thing: when I drop you off at the front door Mrs. Kate Keller will stand tall outside my car and order me to drive off, never to see you, my dearest, again.”

Peter backed his car down the driveway, the wheels making the floorboards shake beneath my feet. I knew I had to soothe him, make easy the rough spots between us. I reached across the front seat, put my hand on his, and said, “About the … pregnancy. I’m probably just excited, overstating things, as usual. It’s only been two, three days since …”

“Since
what?”

I said nothing.

“Oh. Your …”

I nodded.