Helen Keller in Love (4 page)

Then Annie said, “Listen up, Helen. If people stay away from our talks and our stocks keep falling …” She paused. “We won’t be able to keep our house more than another few months.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll fix it,” I said.

But Annie pulled my hand as if to shake me. “Face facts, Helen. Your father stopped paying me my salary twenty years ago, when you were ten years old. He was supposed to pay me until you were eighteen, but you know his will made no provisions for my salary. And you didn’t get your share after he died, even though your sister and brothers did. We’ve paid our own way since you were twenty-three, by God knows how many lectures, your books, that yearly money from Carnegie and Sterling. But it’s different now. I have this damned cough day and night. You may have the strength to cross the country still, six months of the year. But Helen, I just don’t.”

At that moment her cough seemed like a retreat. Some place safe where she could stop living our life, ignore our troubles, and just be alone. From the open window by her bed came a breeze so cold it tightened my chest, but I kept Annie’s hand in my own.

“Keep this in mind. Peter will cost us plenty. But we need him here if I’m too sick to work.”

At the mention of Peter’s name I wanted to run from Annie’s side, just to be near him.

But Annie’s scent of defeat called me back.

She led me across the room to the bed by the windows and sat down.

I turned toward her. “Stay with me,” Annie told me. “It’ll be all right. It’s probably just a scare.” But I pulled my hand away and moved to the window facing the porch. Its glass cool under my fingertips. The glass trembled with the vibrations of a train hurtling across the countryside just past the hotel. I imagined I was on the train with Peter, moving into the night with him. Instead I walked back to the bed where Annie sat and took her hand. She needed me so much. Was it wrong for me to want Peter—any man, really—to help me find a life apart?

The train
in the distant woods left a taste like iron in my mouth.

One thing I never said was how tired I was at times. What people respected most about me was my stamina. Especially that summer of 1916 when we fell into debt. Annie and I never liked paying bills, never liked to feel their envelopes, and now that our lecture tour was a failure because I kept talking against the war, we needed our investment returns; without them we couldn’t pay the maintenance on our house that August, or for the rest of that fall. Still, we never missed the chance to buy a new fur on Newbury Street instead of paying the water bill or the mortgage.

Why didn’t we have enough money? Andrew Carnegie gave me a pension every year. The Sugar King of Boston, John Spaulding, gave me stocks to protect my welfare. Even Mark Twain, whom I met on a warm Sunday in New York, at a lunch in the home of Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence Hutton when I was fourteen, got his friend the “robber baron” Henry Rodgers, of Standard Oil, to help pay for my college education. I had no debt from those years.

But as I sat in the upholstered chair next to Annie’s bed, I knew the truth was that Annie was dependent on me for a living, and all the money we made from lecturing, from my books, went to protect her and pay for my secretaries. Annie and I both needed food, clothes, a new roof on our house, and all the people we required to keep me looking “normal” in other people’s eyes.

“The Star
of Happiness.” That’s what Annie called me during the four years we performed as the “serious part” of a vaudeville show. From Boston to Los Angeles, in theaters ripe with the scent of workers’ boots and whiskey, we went on stage twice daily. I was thrilled; Annie, despondent. For our act she parted the velvet curtains to walk alone onto a stage arranged to look like a residential parlor. Silk dress rustling, the theater’s cigar smoke stinging her eyes, Annie stood beneath the hot lights to call out that no matter what trials I faced, I always met them with optimism and love.

Then I came onstage.

Guided to Annie by the tart scent of her rose perfume, I was exuberant. Backstage I had put on my own makeup, and as I walked out to my audience I smiled as I inhaled their warmth. Then Annie spoke my words. I was the Star of Happiness, because I knew the most important thing in life: love. Love and connection to others. That is what brought true happiness, I said. And I meant it. Music came up as our act ended. As the curtain fell, I felt the audience’s wild applause through my shoes.

But we didn’t do vaudeville just for love.

We also did it so that Annie would have money as she grew old.

No matter that our fellow performers included a man who ate tadpoles. I was proud of myself. In our hotel, Annie, however, spelled into my hand just before sleep, “We have been miscast in life.”

So we fell into debt that summer of 1916. Nothing new. We’d been in and out of debt for years and had tried everything: we had tried not reading the investment reports, we had tried tying them in bundles and putting them in sacks, we had tried making money by lecturing, vaudeville, but by age fifty Annie was worn out. This cough seemed a good reason to do what she had always fought so hard against. To lie down.

And if
she wanted to escape, it would be my duty to provide for the one person who gave up her life so I could have my own.

Then just as the bedsprings shuddered and Annie’s heavy body leaned into the bed she said the magic words: “Helen, we’ve got to have Peter full time as your secretary when we get back home. I just can’t do it anymore. I’m going to make some arrangements. He needs to live nearby.”

I’d never felt so alive—or afraid.

Chapter Five

A
marble cell of dark. Without sight or sound, sometimes my life felt like a prison. But in our Wisconsin hotel room, where the smell of cornfields and night rain filled the air and I knew Peter would be by my side, that cell of dark broke open.

I sat head up in Annie’s room, shoulders back, feet planted solidly on the wooden floor. I was going to be left alone with a man for the first time in my life. “Are you sure?” I asked Annie, my hands searching for her mouth. I lip-read her response by pressing one finger on her throat, one on her lips, and another on her nose, so I could “listen” to her words. I didn’t want to mistake her answer.

“For God’s sake, what choice do we have?” I felt the dry, wry tone of her voice through my hands. “Stuck in this godforsaken town with another talk to give tomorrow, and no way to get home by train if I’m this sick—he’s our savior, Helen. A flawed one, that’s for sure. If you saw the way he eats—crumbs all over his fingers—and I’d rather break stones on the King’s Highway than hear him spout off about politics. If I hear one more thing about those young girls who jumped to their deaths from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, landing on the streets of New York, I’ll scream.”

I didn’t move.

“Perfect he isn’t, not even close.” Annie’s fingers rapped my palm. “But he’s all we’ve got.”

I said nothing, as if my breathing would give me away. The clock on the wall above my chair made a ratcheting vibration as one minute, then two went by.

“But he’s still a man.” Annie’s palm gave off the tautness she always had when she felt an enemy was near. “You’re not to let him touch you. From here up,” she gestured from my waist to my mouth, “nothing. And from here down.” She passed her hand over my waist, hips, and upper legs. “Absolutely nothing.” I was so taken aback that I wanted to jump up and leave the room.

The upholstered chair beneath me scratched. “Yes,” I joked back, to get her mind off how much I wanted Peter to touch me with those fingers of smoke, whiskey, and twine. Instead of answering me Annie leaned forward. The door to her room shuddered as if someone was outside.

“Who is it?” I asked Annie.

“A crowd of latecomers tromping into the lobby, no doubt. They shouldn’t come in this late. I saw them clambering out of their car this morning after a hiking trip to George’s Falls.”

Hoping to keep her attention on them—on anything, instead of Peter—I said, “A whole family and they didn’t bother to come to our talk?”

“Barely anyone comes to our talks as it is. Don’t you see?” She tried to lie against her pillows in bed, but her cough forced her up, and I held her as she bent almost double, her back under my hand a long tense coil. Then she got her breath and went on.

“We used to talk about your ‘miracle’: how you came to read, write, go to Radcliffe—succeed. That’s what audiences want to hear. They don’t want to hear you now, going on about President Wilson and your ideas that this war is a capitalist disaster. For God’s sake, Helen, you can’t encourage people to form a general strike and refuse to go to war.”

“Why shouldn’t I?” I said. “The capitalists don’t care—”

“I already heard that speech,” Annie said, “when you gave it in Carnegie Hall. Helen,” she shook my arm, “come out of the clouds. I just
counted the receipts from tonight’s lecture: it’s
half
of what we got this time last year.” She dropped my hand and exhaled so hard I felt it in my bones.

“In your talk tomorrow, no talk about war. Not a
word
. And drop that letter to the Germans in the trash. Do you hear me?”

“Do I hear you?” I almost started a joke, but then remembered that Peter might laugh, but not Annie, not now. “I don’t want to argue.” I shifted toward the door to the porch. “Peter’s going to take me on stage tomorrow?” I asked again. “Where is he now? Is he still out there?” I felt her stiffen. I moved toward the door and swung it open.

“Close that door.” She walked up behind me and put her hand on the doorknob. “Were you raised in a barn?”

A warm wind mixed with the scent of brandy as she swung the door shut. “But Peter?” I said. My palm still held some of the warmth of his thumb.

“He’s still out there.” Annie turned to the windows that faced the front porch. “You should see him. Pacing the floorboards like a loyal dog.” She paused. “What on earth is he waiting for? Why doesn’t he go to his room for the night?”

“He’s waiting for me,” I said. Annie’s palm turned hard, almost metallic. Her suspicions rose between us, tightening the night air. “Why would he be waiting for you?”

I kept my fingers still in Annie’s hand.

“He works for us.” I was afraid to breathe. “Maybe he’s waiting for us to tell him to go.” Just like that she threw her blanket off, crossed the room in a
sslap-sslap-sslap
of her bare feet, and swung open the door. Peter’s footsteps moved quickly across the porch floor, until he plonked up the hotel’s stairway to his room, where he would stay until the next day.

“No funny business tomorrow, Helen. I mean it.”

“Trust me.” I lied so easily. I took her hand and squeezed it good night.

When
I felt my way to the door, then down the hall, the pine paneling rough under my hands, it was all I could do to stand at the bottom of the stairwell and then go on to my room beside Annie’s instead of climbing those stairs to Peter.

Chapter Six

“D
o you dream in color?” people ask me. “In your dreams can you see?” I wrote a book about how the world comes to me through scents, taste, and that divine medium: touch. In that book I wrote of a dream I had about Annie. I was ashamed to admit that dream, but now it’s time to say it once and for all.