What Is Visible: A Novel (31 page)

The applause is long, and I hope sincere. Many in the crowd have watched me grow up, pass through all the stages of childhood and womanhood. What am I to them? A beacon, a curiosity, an affection, or merely a dark and familiar presence against which all other shades of humanity seem bright? I have tried, in my own rocky fashion, to prove an Inspiration, but it has been so hard to get out of my own way, to know which parts of myself to separate and which to marry with man and with Maker.

Julia leads me to a Christmas tree and I reach for the prickly branches—Doctor’s mustache. But then she kneels with me, and I am delighted to find the base of the tree laden with wrapped packages. My fingers flutter over silk ribbons, alight on tissue paper, crinkly paper, slick wrappings. All for me? “Yes,” she says, “from Perkins and from guests.” I can’t even count them, they are piled so high! I have never had this many presents, even my first Christmas here. I know it is not ladylike, but I sit down on the floor and pick up a small one with a velvet bow I rub against my cheek. I’d like to stick it fast atop my hat, but people would doubtless think it looked silly at my age. Still, I would like to be a present for the crowd. That’s what I hope they think of me: a present to them all from God, to show how little one can possess of what we think it means to be human while still possessing full humanity. I am a gift, though only one ever dared unwrap me.

The first is a bracelet, gold, Julia tells me, from Anagnos. It is engraved on the front and I can almost make out the tiny etched words: “Our Laura for 50 Years.” I rip open another and pull out a long, fuzzy scarf from Jeannette. Julia has given me a raised-letter book of her latest verse (the hubris cannot be vanquished, but that is as it has always been), and Annie has bequeathed me her copy of the
Iliad
. I forget that all are watching me go through my packages and lose myself in the joyful frenzy of the moment, feeling genuinely like that child of fifty years ago, though without any of the fear. Oh, this one is heavy, large, and square. I tear off the paper—cheap and rough, like butcher’s paper—surprising. I run my hands over the smooth wooden box until I find the lid and pop it open. At the back I turn a tiny lever and the music begins to hum through my hands. “Who?” I ask Julia, but there’s no card.

I stand and turn outward to the crowd, holding the box. Who has brought it, this handsome present? I crank it again and another song plays, one I recognize from its beats, “Johnnie My Boy.” The song from my old music box. Is this indeed my own box that I gave Laura years ago? I have never wished for eyes more than at this moment, to scan the crowd before me, sure that I would recognize my Laura, my Kate. Julia takes the box gently from me and says it’s time to greet my visitors. I am buzzing, but I allow her to lead me down from the stage, where I stand waiting for all who want to touch me in the last throes of my celebrity. Hand after hand, they go so fast, a few clumsily attempting to write something, but all I can think is:
that’s not her hand, that’s not her hand
. And then quickly, toward the end, the most familiar fingers close on mine, and I grip them tight, hold on, try to write, but then she is gone. I raise my fingers to my lips. Sweetness. I wheel around, bumping into strangers, grabbing at sleeves, reaching for faces. I make my old noise for Kate, the most beautiful sound I’ve ever mustered, and I’m sure she will hear me and come running back. I have money now to give her. Does she know that? I will give her everything. I make her noise again, louder, and then Anagnos reins me in, pulls me back to center stage, back to all the hands awaiting me, but not the one I want. I have made a spectacle of myself at my own party, but it must be as God intended. It was Kate, I know in my heart it was Kate. I breathe deeply, in and out, in and out, and tell myself that it is all right that she touched me and fled. I do not pretend to understand, and yet all is still lit with a flame from within that cannot, will not, ever be extinguished. She was here; that is the jewel I must cherish. After all these years, she still wanted to see me, to touch me.

Now it is time for Anagnos to wrap up the festivities, though I can still barely catch my breath. Julia takes my hand again but she is not writing about me. I’d thought there would be a summing up of my accomplishments, but no: she writes two names, Edith Thomas and Helen Keller, whom Anagnos calls the
new
deaf-blind girls. Ah, their long search has finally yielded fresh fruit. He says that Edith will be here at Perkins next month and that Annie will be sent immediately to teach Helen in Alabama. So far for Annie to go! I will miss her spitfire. Anagnos ends by saying what “a singular coincidence that Laura’s semicentenary should mark the advent of two little hapless pilgrims to the beneficent care that had given to her life all its brightness.” If they are pilgrims, what am I? Apparently, Mrs. Keller read about me in Dickens’s
American Notes
and thought her daughter might be helped. “So she sent a letter and a picture,” he says, “of the loveliest little girl you’ve ever seen, smiling, dimpled, a perfectly shaped head.” He seems already to have forgotten about Edith in his enthusiasm for describing the beauty of little Miss Helen. I crank the music box again and again, though I know it is rude while he is speaking. I don’t know why this news strikes such a hollow and melancholy gong within my heart. Today was meant to be my day, and yet I have been eclipsed by a more radiant sun. Why must the Lord keep making deaf-blind children? Wasn’t I enough for the world?

N
ow I ask Helen again: “Which sense would you have back?”

“Whichever God chooses,” she says. The perfect, tiny diplomat to God and man. Oh, she will do fine, this second me; she will do so much better than I did because she understands already—or Annie has made her to understand—what will be expected of her. And she might as well be the second Laura Bridgman because she will never be able to be truly herself. Poor darling child. And yet perhaps I have been too much
myself
—is this possible?

“A delightful answer.” I bend close and turn us away from our watchers to allow for a private exchange. She sniffs long and hard against my shoulder. “Speak, speak if you can.” I push the air up from my throat and growl a special naming noise for Helen. The normal ones must be shaking in their boots. “And get the glass eyes,” I tell her, “the bluest marbles fame can buy to stuff into those dry sockets. It will be worth it.”

She taps gently against the glass of my spectacles, and I hold my breath. She traces the prow of my nose and her fingertip rests between my lips. I kiss that finger, and then the palm that she will open to the world.

I want to write out everything—for me, for her—but I am denied the pleasure, or pain, of ever being able to read my own words. You will be able to read them, but I will not. So I write this out into the air, in a grand and looping script, that what is invisible to man may be visible to God.

A
year after her meeting with Helen Keller, on May 4, 1889, Laura Bridgman died at Perkins of a streptococcal infection. She was fifty-nine. Her funeral, attended by hundreds, was held in the Exhibition Hall, and her body taken back to New Hampshire for burial near the Bridgmans’ farm. Laura’s brain was preserved for scientific analysis, and in his 1890 report, Dr. Henry H. Donaldson found no organic traces of disability except for a slightly underdeveloped region of speech and noted only that hers was a “typical female brain.” Though Dr. Howe had planned to write a biography of Laura, he never did, and the task was taken up by his daughters, who published
Laura Bridgman: Dr. Howe’s Famous Pupil and What He Taught Her
in 1903, a work that centered largely on their father.

Julia Ward Howe continued her work as a writer, suffragist, and pacifist and was also, ironically, the creator of Mother’s Day. Her daughters’ biography of her won the Pulitzer Prize in 1917. Literary historian Gary Williams recently discovered an unfinished, novel-length manuscript,
The Hermaphrodite
, written between 1846 and 1847, which she had apparently kept hidden, and his resulting book speculates that the novel explores the complex relationships between Julia, her husband, and Charles Sumner.

Annie Sullivan married but still remained the teacher and companion of Helen Keller until her death at the age of seventy in 1936.

Helen Keller quickly emerged, in her own words, as “the best damn poster child the world has ever known.” She was the first deaf-blind person to earn a university degree, at Radcliffe College, and became a prolific writer, lecturer, and activist. She learned to speak, though barely intelligibly, and was fitted with artificial blue eyes, which her family strove to keep secret. Helen died in 1968 at the age of eighty-seven.

Dr. Howe’s legacy, Perkins Institution, now called Perkins School for the Blind, finally came to embrace Braille, and moved to a larger campus in Watertown, Massachusetts, in 1912. It is the world’s preeminent school for the education of both the blind and the deaf-blind, with partner programs in sixty-five countries.

In her 1929 autobiography,
Midstream: My Later Life
, Helen Keller wrote that had Laura Bridgman been blessed with a lifelong teacher and companion like Annie Sullivan, “she would have outshone me.”

I first read about Laura Bridgman in a 2001 review of her biographies,
The Education of Laura Bridgman
by Ernest Freeberg and
The Imprisoned Guest
by Elisabeth Gitter, both of which have proved invaluable resources. I was astounded that I’d never heard of this remarkable woman, given the extent of her fame in the mid-nineteenth century. Why had she been virtually erased from history, leaving us to believe that Helen Keller was the first deaf-blind person to learn English? While the idea of a deaf-blind woman who also couldn’t taste or smell probably conjures for many the narrow cell of a cruelly limited existence, my first thought was that Laura Bridgman must have possessed a most fascinating and complex inner life. I also felt, in some strange and unfathomable way, that on some level, I already knew her.

Over the course of two years of research, both at Perkins and through fellowships at the Houghton Library at Harvard, the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Massachusetts Historical Society, I really did begin to know and to understand her in historical context and in relation to the other principals in her story. The more I learned, the more questions I had about this woman who became the nineteenth century’s greatest educational, philosophical, and theological experiment.

In writing
What Is Visible
, I tried to maintain my balance on what the writer Thomas Mallon has called the “sliding scale of historical fiction,” adhering to the “what might have happened
as well
 
” model as opposed to the “what might have happened
instead
.” Besides Oliver Caswell, there were two other deaf-blind persons at Perkins during Laura’s stay: Lucy Reed and Julia Brace. I chose not to include them in the novel because neither one made any real educational progress; Lucy wore a bag over her head and never learned the alphabet, while Julia was largely inexpressive and unresponsive, learning only the most rudimentary sign in her single year at Perkins. On this note, there is only one major swerve from Laura’s documented life and that is my invention of the character of Kate, the orphaned Irish girl who becomes her lover. There is no record of Laura ever having had a romantic relationship—save her mistaken belief that her teacher’s beau was courting
her
—but that doesn’t mean, of course, that it didn’t happen. As a novelist friend advised, “If you’re going to write her whole life, you’ve got to give her
something
.” And so I gave her Kate. I chose a lesbian relationship rather than a heterosexual one because the journals and letters of Dr. Howe and her teachers repeatedly emphasize how much Laura didn’t like men and how much she did like women, especially touching them. Dr. Howe’s edict that Laura not be allowed into the other girls’ beds is true, and quite telling at a time when adolescents, and even adults, of the same sex routinely slept together.

As for my choice to make the sexual relationship a somewhat sadomasochistic one, it seemed natural to me that if one has only the sense of touch, the desire would be to push it to its extreme. It is also noted in Laura’s teachers’ journals that she often “hurt herself on purpose,” though not exactly how, and so the ritual self-cutting seemed to fit also. Laura claimed late in life that she had partially regained the ability to taste, but there were no tests run, and while it is medically possible to regain that sense, it is highly unlikely.

As Kate is my creation, then obviously she did not bear Dr. Howe’s child. His romantic life proved a rich area for speculation, however, because of the numerous extant letters mentioning his infidelities, even though his daughters methodically destroyed much of their parents’ correspondence, especially to each other. Howe also accused his wife, Julia Ward Howe, of having an affair with Horace Binney Wallace, who indeed committed suicide after she left Rome. It is also true that while Doctor left Laura two thousand dollars, he left his wife nothing. The exact reasons are unknown, but his dismay at her possible adultery and her continued work as a writer seem to have been enough, in his mind, to merit this final act of hostility. As for Doctor’s relationship with Charles Sumner, two recent academic works,
Diva Julia
by Valarie H. Ziegler and
Hungry Heart: The Literary Emergence of Julia Ward Howe
by Gary Williams, explore the possibility of an affair between them. Both scholars come to the conclusion that while Sumner seemed to push for a physical relationship, it was probably never consummated due to Howe’s reluctance.

Dr. Howe’s involvement with John Brown and the Secret Six is entirely factual, including Brown’s visit to Boston and Howe’s flight to Canada. While it is not known whether Laura Bridgman actually met Brown when he was at Perkins, she did encounter all of the other real-life historical figures in the novel, most significantly Charles Dickens, who devoted an entire chapter of
American Notes
to her. There is no proof that she was introduced to Emily Dickinson’s poetry, but it is entirely feasible since Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Miss Dickinson’s mentor, was a frequent visitor at Perkins. The versions of the poems used in the text are taken from
The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson
, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, which restored them to the original versions that Higginson would have had before he edited them years later for publication. The letters in chapters 5 and 7 are fictionalized, but they are based on factual events that occurred during that time period among all the characters. The poems attributed in the text to Julia Ward Howe were indeed all written by her.

While Julia Ward Howe and Sarah Wight became friends, there was enduring friction between Laura and Julia. The ear-thrusting incident is fabricated, though Laura was known to have slapped her teachers, fellow students, and even once bitten Charles Sumner. Though the use of gloves to punish her is my invention, it was suggested by the repeated handcuffing of Lucy Reed by Dr. Howe during her short time at Perkins. Laura was also highly discouraged from making her noises, including being asked by Howe to do so only in the kitchen closet. Laura’s use as a pawn to advance the causes of both phrenology and anti-Calvinism is well documented, as is Laura’s decision to be baptized and Howe’s rage and disappointment with her decision. The scene at the fund-raiser is fictional, though Howe did keep a vast collection of phrenological specimens on the premises.

Dr. Howe sent Laura home to New Hampshire in 1850, where she almost starved to death, and his quotes denigrating both her and her family are taken directly from his Annual Report. After he allowed her to return to Perkins, the
Boston Evening Transcript
proposed sending Laura to the London Exhibition as America’s greatest accomplishment, but Doctor declined, as he did Dorothea Dix’s offer to fund a lifelong companion for her. Whether or not he refused Laura artificial eyes is not known, though it’s clear that if he’d wanted her to have them, she would have had them.

As for Sarah Wight, I was blessed to discover her husband Edward Bond’s shipboard journal in the Houghton Library, where I was told I was the only one who’d ever read it. Bond wrote of how “the one sin of his youth” had ruined his life, his chances with Sarah, and possibly even threatened his sanity. He was not allowed to be a missionary, but sent to the Sandwich Islands in a purely administrative capacity. Though Sarah had previously refused his offer of marriage, she joined him when she was let go from Perkins. I was fascinated by the question of whether he told her about the syphilis; however, his anguished journal revealed him to be possessed of such goodness and moral clarity that I felt sure he had given her a choice. We know that she chose to stay with him and bear his children and that she died in McLean Asylum, though whether from syphilis or an inherited mental condition is unclear.

After her rescue from the almshouse, Annie Sullivan lived in a cottage at Perkins with Laura for several years and Laura helped teach her the manual alphabet, which augments current American Sign Language, and which Annie then taught to Helen Keller.

The search for a “second Laura Bridgman” was conducted in earnest by Michael Anagnos, Howe’s successor, in what one historian termed “essentially a deaf-blind beauty pageant,” and Helen Keller was chosen because she was judged to be the prettiest, and therefore the potentially best “poster child.” Luckily for Perkins—and for the world—Helen also turned out to be a genius. And yet it is clear, as William James wrote in an essay for the
Atlantic
, “that without Laura Bridgman there could never have been a Helen Keller.” There is no record of what transpired at the meeting between Laura and Helen, save the fact that Helen stepped on Laura’s foot.

“The novelist,” said E. L. Doctorow, “has to break through the facts to get at the truth.”

It is my greatest hope that I have broken through in my search for the real Laura Bridgman, the
realest
Laura Bridgman.