Miss Spitfire (19 page)

I feel a change in the way she grips my hand. Her muscles, so often limp with indifference, strain to catch each movement. My chest heaves as I realize the difference: She's listening, with every bone and fiber.

Something is happening inside her head.

The letters don't thud blankly into her palm. I feel them crackle through her skin, forging a lightning-path up the muscles in her arm. Her chin trembles. Light rinses over her face, smothering my momentary impulse to pat her hand.

Beneath the spout the fingers of her free hand move of their own accord.

Rigid with astonishment, Helen pulls my whole arm under the cold stream, spelling “water” again and again and yet again, begging me to understand.

My eyes well. “Water,” I murmur, wrapping both my hands round hers.

W-a-t-e-r
. I cradle the word like an egg in my hands, midwife to this single expression like nothing Helen has given voice to before-neither anger, satisfaction, nor desire. The weight of it chokes me.

I nod. “Yes.” She spells the word once more to herself and nods. Amazement makes her motion slow, almost graceful, and I know she's realizing, as she never has before, how simple it can be to make the world understand anything in her mind. I feel a bursting: the flash of two minds meeting there in my palm.

In a frenzy Helen breaks free and drops to the ground. I stand for a moment, looking dumbly into my empty hands as if I expect to find something left behind-a broken shell, a withered cocoon? Pulsing with excitement, Helen slaps the wet earth at my feet, seizing my skirts like a desperate pauper.

I fall to my knees. She takes my hand, beats the muddy ground with it, then grabs at me to spell. My fingers won't make the letters fast enough. “G-r-o-u-n-d.” In the space of a breath she spells the word to me, to herself, to the very ground beneath us.

Ravenous for more, Helen pulls me to the pump,
the trellis, anything within reach, tearing their names from my fingers. Her breath comes in great, choking gulps, like a crippled laugh. She throws her arms out wide, ready to embrace the world. Flinging herself round, her hands fall on me.

She stops still. Her fingers walk up to my face. I watch her throat bob with a heavy swallow. For the first time she seems unsure of herself. Softer now, she pats my cheek, then my hand.

Me. She wants to know what I am, in a single word.

I bite my lips as I spell out the letters:
t-e-a-c-h-e-r.

“Teacher,” I say, pulling her small hand to my breast. “Teacher.” She nods.

Just then the nursemaid comes into the pump house carrying Mildred. Touching her sister, Helen gropes for my hand, then halts. Her head snaps toward the sky, struck by another realization.

B-a-b-y,
she spells, and touches my face. Wild with pride, I jerk my head up and down. “Yes.”

Helen's face shines as though she's cracked open a cask of jewels. I imagine the dozens of words she's copied in oblivious imitation for all these weeks suddenly bursting to life inside her mind. Reeling with possibilities, she tumbles toward the house, hands flailing for objects to name.

A laugh burbles up inside me, and I shout after her, “Helen!”

My hands rise to my mouth. Five weeks, and this is the first time I've called Helen by her name.

Staggering up from my knees, I rush to her side. I take hold of her wrists, commanding her to be still. With wavering hands I place her palm over her breastbone and hold it in place as I spell.

H-e-l-e-n
.

Through the stillness I feel her heart fluttering against her ribs. Moving her fingers carefully as if they might break, she repeats the letters of her name, then pats her chest, once.

“Yes,” I whisper, nodding. “Yes-Helen.”

Her eyes glow like opals with the tears.

All through the yard and house we race, Helen gobbling the fledgling words like nectar. Her unending appetite, her clinging eagerness, thrills me, making every touch seem a caress. Everything our hands fall upon feels new and alive; her face grows brighter with each new name.

Until she finds the fragments of the Perkins doll.

In our room she makes her way to the hearth, where the doll clatters under her boots. Bending down, she touches the fragments. Her mouth pleats as she tries to piece the doll back together. When the bits won't join, she plops to the floor, and her little face falls. Tears the size of raindrops roll from her eyes.

The sight of Helen crying for that doll twists my heart and makes it dance, till I cry too, though not for the doll. No word I could spell to her would ease the pain. I can only sit down beside her and brush the tears from her cheeks, begging her, “Don't cry, love, don't cry. She doesn't matter anymore.”

By nightfall my body thrums with exhilaration. If I'd ever seen a child born, it couldn't compare to what happened at the pump today. Helen opened before my eyes, and whatever it is that makes us human flowed into her as if I'd poured it from my own hands.

As I help her undress for bed, I spell the name of each of her garments. “Pinafore,” “dress,” “shoes,” “stockings,” “nightdress.” Climbing into the bed itself, she learns “sheet,” “quilt,” “mattress,” “spread,” and “pillow.” I cover her up and cleave our hands apart. Helen stretches toward me, troubled by the separation. Our fingers have been tangled together since we left the pump, it seems.

Her distress touches a long-neglected place in the center of me. I know Helen needs me, perhaps more than I ever needed her. Our connection runs deeper than affection, for without my hand in hers, she sinks into darkness and silence, the depth of which she's only today begun to fathom. I give her hand a squeeze, tucking a rag doll under the sheet for company.

“I'll be right there, dear,” I whisper, brushing the hair from her flushed cheek. The severity of her sudden dependence astounds me; her thirst for the world burns in her skin, and only I can quench it for her.

And yet I want to give her more than myself. I want to see the word-seeds I drop into her hands blossom into ideas. I want to learn the patterns of her mind. To watch Helen discover her thoughts—her self—once more.

Quickly I undress and slip under the covers. Helen's hand finds mine in the dark. I wait for her to spell, to ask for one more word. Instead she scumbles her fingers across my face, pausing for a moment at the teardrop-shaped hollow above my lips. Wriggling nearer, she steals into my arms and presses her lips to my cheek.

I think my heart will burst with the joy that floods it.

I close my arms round her, feel her warm weight against me, and I know—this child is mine, and I am hers. She is not of my body, but I am mother to Helen's heart and mind.

H-e-l-e-n,
I spell into her listening palm. The feel of it is like a prayer between my fingers.

T-e-a-c-h-e-r,
she answers.

Teacher. She's only begun to grasp the breadth of it, and already that one word stirs my very bones. My heart falls open before her, ready to be fashioned by her two small hands.

H-e-l-e-n a-n-d T-e-a-c-h-e-r,
I spell back. I hardly know how to begin telling her what or how much this means.

But I shall try. However long it takes, I shall try.

About Annie and Helen

A
nne Sullivan was twenty years old on the day she met Helen Keller—a day Helen would celebrate ever after as her “soul's birthday.” Within a month Annie had broken through to Helen by making her understand the miracle of language. From that moment at the water pump until Annie's death in 1936, Helen called Annie by no other name but “Teacher.”

For the next fifty years Annie rarely left Helen's side. Her pupil would become an international celebrity, lecturer, writer, and activist, while Annie was often overlooked and literally pushed aside. In spite of it all, her loyalty never faltered. Anchored by Helen's unwavering devotion, Annie remained capricious, contrary, lively, and courageous almost to the end.

In 1904 Helen became the first deaf-blind person to earn a college degree, but it was Annie who had spelled four years of classroom lectures and textbooks into Helen's hands. While she was still in college,
Ladies' Home Journal
commissioned Helen to write her autobiography. The book became a classic, and its editor, John Macy, became Annie's husband. For almost nine years the three lived together as a family. From 1913 until 1923 Helen and Annie toured the United States and Canada, giving speeches and lectures, and performing on the vaudeville circuit. In 1918 they even made a silent film, called
Deliverance
.

Beginning in 1916 Annie's health began to falter. Her eyesight dimmed, and she developed what doctors feared was tuberculosis—the same disease that had killed Jimmie at Tewksbury. For the first and only time in their lives Helen and Annie were separated for five months when Annie was sent to Puerto Rico, in hopes of recovering her strength. It was only a temporary fix.

During the 1920s, as Helen campaigned tirelessly for the blind, Polly Thomson, hired in 1914 as the pair's secretary, slowly began to take over Annie's position as Helen's public companion. By 1933 Annie was virtually blind and growing frail, though she told Helen, “I am trying so hard to live for you.”

The last words Annie spoke, recorded by Polly Thomson on October 15, 1936, were of her brother Jimmie, and then Helen: “God help her to live without me when I go.” Soon after, Annie slipped into a coma; she died five days later, with Helen holding her hand.

Upon her death in 1936 Anne Sullivan became the first woman to be interred in the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, on her own merits. Monuments to her memory stand around the world—even the somewhat dubious honor of a building and sculpture in her name at Tewksbury. In 1932 Helen had persuaded her to accept an honorary degree from Temple University.

Though the loss of her beloved teacher shook Helen to her core, she would live another thirty years, writing books (including her own biography of Annie, called simply
Teacher
), giving speeches, and raising funds for the blind until she was eighty years old, outliving even Polly Thomson. Helen Keller died in 1968, just short of her eighty-eighth birthday.

To the world Helen Keller will always be something of a miracle. But to Helen, Annie Sullivan, “Teacher,” was the world. As Helen herself wrote:

During her first year in Tuscumbia, Annie wrote regularly to her housemother at Perkins. Though the originals were lost to a house fire in 1946, extensive excerpts of Annie's letters survive in the original and restored editions of Helen's autobiography
The Story of My Life
. The bulk of this novel is based on those letters, and they are the source of the quotes at the head of each chapter. For the stories of Annie and Jimmie's life in Tewksbury, I referred almost exclusively to
Anne Sullivan Macy,
a biography written by Nella Braddy Henney just three years before Annie's death. A close friend to both Annie and Helen, Nella was the first person to whom Annie confided the stories of her years at the almshouse; even Helen herself knew nothing of the shame of Tewksbury until 1926.

It's rather a presumptuous thing to write someone else's story—even more so to try to write it in her own voice. The best any author of this sort of book can hope to do is present the truth as he or she sees it. I am grateful that Annie herself knew this and said so to Nella Braddy Henney: “The truth of a matter is not what I tell you about it, but what you divine in regard to it.” I have kept this thought in my mind during the whole writing of this book. What you have read is what I have divined and what I believe to be emotionally true. In her own way, I believe Annie would approve.

Although I was as faithful as possible to the historical record, there is one intentional wrinkle in the time line I must confess to: “Bessie's Song to Her Doll,” the rhyme about a doll called Matilda Jane, was not written by Lewis Carroll until 1893—a full six years after this novel is set. However, the poem was so appropriate to the story I just couldn't resist including it.

—S. M.