Helen Keller in Love (5 page)

The night Annie told me we were almost out of money and that she was sick, I fumbled my way into my room but avoided the bed. I could not sleep. Instead I sat heavily in the desk chair by the door and read in the dark. My fingers traced the Braille pages so easily. But even that wouldn’t calm me.

Because Peter would be my private secretary for the rest of the summer.

As morning’s faint sunlight fell on my arms I pitched into an uneasy sleep.

And I dreamed that Annie was perched high above Niagara Falls as I pushed her straight to the waters below.

When I woke up, that image—heavy, murky in its shape—hovered at the dark edge of my memory. The Wisconsin air was heavy with rain, a sodden scent, and I couldn’t wait to see Peter, tell him I needed him by my side that day. If I didn’t go to him then, I might not go. So as the heavy thud of farm trucks labored up the road outside, I felt my way to my closet, picked a fresh dress from the first hanger, then crossed to my door and slowly made my way up the stairway. In my own house I have memorized everything—tables, chairs, rooms—and walk quite fast. But in new places I am lost; I can’t find my way even from one room to another without a hand on my shoulder to guide me.

In my
well of dark, I held the railing, climbed one stair, two, until my foot reached a pocket of air. I was at the top of the stairs. One door, two, three, I worked my way past the first three rooms and stopped nervously outside the fourth door.

Two quick raps woke Peter. He opened the door and led me into his room, around the coffee table to sit on the settee by his windows. He leaned back easily against the cushions, the scent of night, whiskey, and tobacco on his skin.

“Come on. Spill the beans. What is it?” he said, as if it were a normal occurrence for a woman to bang on his bedroom door at seven a.m. I shifted beside him, aware of his palm on my arm. “Okay,” he said after I told him Annie was too sick to take me on stage that morning, and that I needed him with me, well, all day. “We’ll trot over to the café, have a bite to eat, then do your show.”

I paused, but he didn’t seem to notice. I felt him flip his wrist to the side, and guessed he was checking his watch. “Right, we have enough time,” he said. “I’ll get ready, then we’ll shoot over there.”

Still I didn’t move.

“Or, maybe you’ve had breakfast?” I stood stock still, and he paused.

“How would I get breakfast without Annie, or you?” I finally said. “The waiters don’t know fingerspelling, and I can hardly read the menu or tell them my order, you know.” I smiled, but I could feel in his fingers the realization that I really couldn’t go out and do the simplest things on my own.

“Well, let’s get on it,” he said, and strode off toward the stairs. The
carumph
of his footsteps receded from me in a rapid
tap, tap, tap
, and then, as I leaned against the doorjamb, they came right back.

“Another blunder.” He gave me his arm. “I lead you, right?” And when he stepped off quickly down the hall and led me out into the day, the weak
rays of early sun fell on my bare arms. We crossed the bumpy grass toward the restaurant and the scent of waffles and hot coffee, the mist of the distant lake rising in the air. When I tripped over a thick root sticking out of the grass, Peter clumsily grabbed my arm, lifted me back to my feet, and said, “Don’t even think of saying it.”

“That cliché?” I said back, eager to feel the sinewy warmth of his arm as I hung on.

He sped me across the grass. We got to the restaurant and he pulled out a chair for me, its metal frame sending a tingling up the backs of my legs as he dragged it across the floor. He said, “Yes, don’t say that cliché.”

“About the blind leading the blind?” I tucked my napkin into my lap, hungrier than I’d ever been.

“That would be the one.”

He slid a menu across the table to me. I felt a sudden vibration as he pushed his chair away from the table. “Nature calls. Pick out whatever you want. I’ll order when I get back.” I felt his footsteps receding, and I picked up the menu, its creased edge pin sharp in my grip.

Waiting. The curse of the deaf-blind. Not only couldn’t I read the menu myself, I also couldn’t ask one of the waiters to read it for me, either. Menus weren’t in Braille, and the waiters—like most everyone—didn’t know the manual fingerspelling language I used. So I tapped my feet, sat up straight, and pressed my hands into the cool tabletop, waiting for Peter’s footsteps to thud across the floor so he could translate the menu.

I sat taller, to suppress my impatience. It was infuriating, this waiting. I was thirty-seven years old. And like a child, an infant, really, I was at the mercy of others. Hour after hour of my life was spent waiting. Waiters brushed past my chair, the scent of raspberries and sugar trailing from their trays as they passed.

“Onward, missy.” Peter returned, scented of pine soap, and when he pulled out his chair he sat close to me, his leg brushing mine. He picked up the menu.

“Read
it?” I spelled cautiously into his hand.

“Yes, ma’am. Even the descriptions.”

I leaned forward.

“If being your private secretary is this much work, you’re going to have to pay me extra.” His voice hummed through my hand.

“I’ll pay whatever you want.” I pressed my fingers closer to his lips. I couldn’t wait to taste the pancakes with wild blueberries, pockets of flavor in my mouth.

Over breakfast we practiced my talk, until the bell clanged its metallic
thong
into the air at ten and Peter led me across the grass to the Chautauqua tent, all the while saying he didn’t know why the American flag hung so easily over the tent when we were approaching war.

That morning he and I bounded up the three wooden steps to the makeshift stage, the rustling of the crowd a welcome wave of warmth. After flattening his tie against his shirt with one hand, and then faltering a bit—I felt his weight press heavily into the wooden floorboards—his voice rang out into the air. For ten minutes he told the crowd of how at age seven I was a child with no language who fought Annie at every turn, but after weeks of spelling words into my hand Annie finally took me to the water pump in our yard. In the heat of the day Annie splashed that water over my hand, her fingers flying in mine: w-a-t-e-r. W-a-t-e-r. I leaped up, awakened. Everything had a name. Life penetrated my muffled world.

Beside Peter, I held his arm, and the way he pulled me close told me that the story thrilled him.

The crowd applauded my “miracle” for so long, the stage reverberated under my feet.

The
truth is, I don’t remember the moment at the water pump. For two decades I’ve heard it hundreds of times. I know it like my name. I’ve stood by Annie as she told crowds in Boston, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and tiny towns like Albion, and Rock Creek, Michigan, about my awakening. I’ve even written about it in my books. But I have no memory of it at all.

What I do remember is this: It was June 1888. Annie took me to be examined by Alexander Graham Bell, then a prominent doctor for the deaf in Washington, D.C. Was there any way my hearing might be improved? I was eight years old. Dr. Bell said no, I would never hear. But he told Annie that he had an exciting new invention. It allowed anyone who didn’t know manual fingerspelling to “talk” with the deaf.

“This could work for Helen,” Dr. Bell said to Annie. She spelled his words to me, and then he slid a large, bulky “glove” over my small hand. Printed on it were letters of the “normal” alphabet. Raised, they could be felt by the wearer. I felt them on my palm. Dr. Bell tapped first the
h
, then the
e
. Then, he pressed down harder, on the
l
two times. Last came the
o
.

“Hello,” I answered back. A feeling of intense pleasure flooded through me.

With my free hand, I took his. I had “spoken” to someone without Annie interpreting. Dr. Bell said that with practice, hearing people could easily learn how to use his invention to talk to me. “Helen will have freedom,” he said to Annie, who spelled his words to me.

I couldn’t wait.

All the way back to Tuscumbia on the train I spelled to Annie that soon I would be able to speak with Father, who never was good at the manual fingerspelling, and my Auntie Ev, or anyone else.

“No,” Anne spelled back. “It’s not a good idea.” She said I wouldn’t need to communicate with others because while she was with me, she would tell me everything I needed to know. I wouldn’t need to talk to anyone else.

She
wanted to keep me close because of her own loneliness. People say together we were miraculous. We were. But we were also isolated; loneliness engulfed me in those years. I’m older now. I realize I want more than a story frayed from its telling.

As the Wisconsin crowd’s applause receded, the stage became still. I held Peter’s hand more tightly in mine as, fingers tense, he introduced me to the crowd: “For twenty-five years Helen Keller has called for the rights of the deaf and blind around the world. But she has more to say than that,” Peter said, spelling his words into my hand, then giving me a nudge so hard I almost bolted forward.

So as Peter called out my words to the audience, while I spelled them into his palm, I said everything Annie warned me against: the floorboards of the stage jutted out and warped beneath my shoes as I stepped forward, my hand in Peter’s, aware that he would boom my words out to the waiting crowd. “Let no capitalists send our innocent boys to slaughter. We’ve suffered long enough at the hands of a government that sends boys to war for its own profit. This must
stop
. Strike, strike, strike against the war.”

I believed then that Peter would set me free.

When the crowd filed out, the show’s manager came up on stage to give us our night’s wages. Right after he left Peter said, “Helen, is this really all you get for all this work?” He told me he’d taken out the manager’s 20 percent, and then the thirty dollars for his own salary. “The ticket sales were lower than ever, and twenty people asked the manager for their money back,” he added.

I wasn’t the Helen Keller they expected, or wanted. But I didn’t care.

“It was worth it,” I said.

“Jesus,
Mary, and Joseph,” Peter said later that afternoon after the show. I’d wolfed down two hamburgers with him at a burger shack by the hotel—Annie would never let me eat burgers in public: too vulgar, she said. But I couldn’t help it. With Peter I wanted to eat hot dogs, wear high heels, drink gin. “Here’s the problem as I see it,” he said. He’d just paid the lunch bill and was scribbling down the costs for the hotel and the food for our trip back to Boston the next day.

“You don’t mind how much you take in, and I don’t know enough about your situation to give you advice.” We started across the lawn for the hotel. The sharp scent of pine trees filled the air, and the pine needles underfoot made the ground yield to my shoes. Into the bed of needles the day’s happiness slipped away. “If this keeps up, we’ll be lucky to get back to Wrentham with a few cents.”

“We’ll work it out,” I said, my face suddenly cool as we walked under the hotel’s covered front porch. That afternoon I napped on my hotel room bed. I slept a deep, dreamless sleep. Night would come, and with it, Peter.