What Love Sees (2 page)

Except Chanteur couldn’t. Poor Chanteur was in a cage next to her, the only thing in the room that seemed real. She knew everything the canary could sing, the short little chirps that sounded like he was practicing scales. Then there were lyrical passages that reminded her of “Greensleeves.” She wondered what Chanteur looked like. Maybe she’d never see him. She had to find out. That was all, she just had to.

The hospital seemed quieter than usual. No one had walked by in the hall for a long time. If she were quiet, maybe no one would discover her moving around. She lifted the covers and slowly swung her legs out over the edge of the bed. Her heart beat so hard it made her chest and throat bounce. She slid down carefully until her toes touched the floor. It felt like cold stone. With her hands in front of her, she edged toward the bird’s song, trying to keep her head very still. The room was smaller than she remembered so her foot rammed into the table leg and shook the cage. The bird stopped singing.

“It’s okay, Chanteur,” she whispered. “I won’t hurt you.” Her hands sought the door of the wire cage and opened it. She reached inside and he started flapping around. Feathers brushed by. Probably his tail. Not very soft at all. His body would be softer. She moved her hand to the left. Wings flapped. Tiny claws scraped across the back of her hand to the right. She went right. The bird let out a screech. She drew in her breath. “I won’t hurt,” she cooed again. She kept her hand still. Maybe he would calm down and stand on her finger. Nothing happened. She closed the cage door and picked her way back to bed, her heart thumping.

“What’s all that racket?” Nurse Williams asked at the doorway. “You’ve been out of bed again, Jean Treadway, I just know it.”

“Who, me?”

“You’ve been moving your head, bothering that bird again, haven’t you?”

“No, I wouldn’t hurt him. He’s my yellow music box.”

“Yellow? That bird’s not yellow.”

“I thought all canaries were. What color is he?”

“Kind of a blue-gray.”

It wasn’t an important thing, but it shocked her. She couldn’t assume anything anymore.

Another patient, Mrs. Whitelaw-Reid, whose husband owned some big New York newspaper, gave her the canary. It didn’t occur to her then to ask what color it was, but later when Mrs. Whitelaw-Reid gave her a fluffy comforter for her birthday, she asked what that looked like. Comforters could be any color. “It has yellow flowers on a white background,” Mrs. Whitelaw-Reid said in a voice that reminded her of a clarinet. Now Jean wondered whether this lady looked as soft as she sounded. Or maybe she was big and mean-looking and only sounded sweet. How was she to be sure of anything?

A few weeks earlier, after Jean’s second operation, Mrs. Whitelaw-Reid bought her a typewriter. It was such a big gift she didn’t know how to respond. What did Mrs. Whitelaw-Reid know that would make her give her a typewriter? It made a hollow feeling in her stomach.

After four months in Harkness Hospital, Dr. Wheeler told her it was time to take the bandages off again. The first time hadn’t worked. In fact, it was worse. Everything looked all slanty and it made her dizzy, so they had to do it over.

“Finally,” she said. “Now can I sit up and move my head?”

Dr. Wheeler chuckled. “Yes, Jean, that’s what it means.”

That was the last time he chuckled that day. All during the tests he kept asking her, “How many fingers can you see?” Then he just asked, “Can you see my fingers?” Then, “What can you see?”

“Just light and dark. Shadows moving.”

He was quiet for a long time. She felt her breathing come in waves. It seemed the only thing she was sure of. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“Writing.” He sat down on her bed and took her hand. “Jean, I don’t like having to tell you this, but I don’t think we can do any better. I’m sorry. The retina wasn’t just detached. It was torn, too. That probably happened when you fell off that horse. It just made things worse. Right now we just don’t know enough yet about retinas to repair it.”

Her throat clamped shut so that she couldn’t speak. She felt numb.

“If you could have waited a few more years to have your trouble, I might have been able to do more for you.” His voice sounded tired, kinder than father’s, and the words hung in the air in front of her, strange and hollow, like the echo of a great bell.

“You mean I won’t be able to see, not ever?”

“I don’t think so.”

She had wondered how he might say it to her and now here it was, just like that: “I don’t think we can do any better. I’m sorry.” So it happened? It’s over? That’s it? Me? Me. He’s talking to me. She couldn’t swallow.

What if she hadn’t moved her head? Or gotten out of bed? Would it have made a difference? She had to know. Her lips felt dry and she moistened them but she still couldn’t ask. She didn’t want him angry with her.

He just sat there without moving, his weight making her bed dip down. Her hand grew hot and sticky in his and she pulled it away. In the quiet she felt his helplessness cross the space between them, a feeling entirely new to her, and she understood that he was genuinely sad. For an instant everything else slid away and she felt sorry for him because he had to tell her he had failed.

“I’ve seen a lot already. Twelve years.” Then it all rushed at her. She felt her bottom lip quiver, her eyes water, and she turned away. Why wouldn’t he just go away so she could cry or scream or do something—she didn’t know what. She held tight onto herself until she felt him get up from the bed.

How was she to know when she was actually alone? Anybody could be walking by the doorway. She didn’t always hear their footsteps. It was like she still had the bandages on. Nothing seemed real. Not even this.

After a while there were muffled voices in the corridor. She strained to listen.

“I can’t believe it. She didn’t cry or anything when he told her. Just sat there like a stone statue.”

“What did you expect?” That was Nurse Williams. “You don’t really know her defeat just because she doesn’t scream it. Let her be discreet about her grief. It’s the New England way.”

She felt watched. She slumped down in bed and pulled the covers over her head.

What did they expect? Screaming? Father would expect self-control. Just like his own. And Mother? Mother always said there was a reason for not expressing things that hurt. There might be less to feel. Maybe she could crowd it out by knowing she had behaved well.

What this would do to her life, she was afraid to guess. She could still go to dancing school. But why? Bobby and Don wouldn’t ask her to dance, now. She felt stifled and shoved down the covers. Well, she could still go skating on the pond. You don’t need a partner to skate. And if somebody helped her, she could still climb the apple tree. But she was never going down Kelly’s Hill on a ripper again, or even on a sled. That was too scary even when she could see.

Some things wouldn’t change. She still wanted to smoke in secret, that was sure, but with real cigarettes. She would ask Tready. Cousin Tready was a year older and she smoked Old Golds that she snitched from her father. She would ask her. Play cigarettes were kid things anyway, and kid things seemed foolish to her now.

That night, Nurse Williams kissed her goodnight and it shocked her. Miss Williams’ fuzz on her lip tickled. She must have a moustache. The thought made her cry a little there, right in front of her.

“Now you try to go right to sleep, Jean.”

“Was it sunny or cloudy today?”

“A little cloudy. Why?”

“Oh, nothing.” She pulled the covers up under her chin. “Good night.”

She wondered if the last day she had seen was sunny or cloudy. She wished she knew, but she couldn’t remember. It was horrible that she couldn’t remember.

When Father and Mother brought her to Harkness in the cushiony back seat of the Packard limousine five months earlier, it was fall. Then she could still see enough to know that Connecticut was blazing with orange and gold. Mother kept saying, “Look at the trees, Jean. Just look at those trees.” She wished she had.

Now, a month after Dr. Wheeler took the bandages off, she rode home with her canary and cage wrapped in blankets on her right and her typewriter in its bulky case on her left. “It’s snowing a little,” Mother said. She heard her mother’s voice as if for the first time. The words fell delicately, just like the downy whiteness she imagined falling along the roadside. She didn’t answer. She was studying a new alphabet. Her fingers inched across a stiff, perforated page.

Bobby still brought her flowers and she tried to do things with Sybil but she felt awkward, young and old at the same time. It was embarrassing to ask to be with her, like she was asking for a favor. Instead, she spent her time learning to type and to read the six-dot Braille cell. In a way she had not expected, the world was new again. Home was still cozy, but different. The terrace roses below her bedroom window smelled sharper. The Ingraham family clocks chimed louder and reverberated longer. A bronze statue of Nathan Hale stood on a pedestal in the library. That first winter she noticed how cold the bronze was. When summer came the figure attracted the heat from the bay window and she could barely touch him.

But the world was smaller than ever before. It consisted almost entirely of Hickory Hill. From the moment she arrived home, not a piece of furniture was ever moved. Her first need, Nurse Williams told her, was to relearn home, to sense the length of the staircases, the route from her bed to the bathroom, the distance from the twin grand pianos at one end of the living room to the fireplace at the other. It was forty feet, but how much did forty feet feel like? She paced it off. The polished wood of her piano felt smooth and cool. She held her hands in front of her and walked until her toes touched something hard. She smelled ashes and reached forward and felt the wood paneling of the fireplace.

She remembered the first time Father had shown them the new house six years earlier. On moving day she and Lucy raced their brothers across that room and screamed when they beat the boys. Since then the living room had lost that spirit. Now it contained gentle conversation of Mother’s reading club, teacups placed carefully in saucers, her own piano practice. No more races. No more screaming. Now the only laughter in the living room tinkled as in crystal goblets. It didn’t roar. The sounds felt comfortable to her now.

The dining room, too, gave her a feeling of warmth. Whenever she walked in, she smelled flowers. Her place was at Mother’s right so Mother could butter the toast and set it on her butter plate at breakfast. It would always be there. She could count on that. If something were missing, Mother would step on the buzzer under the Persian rug. Mary, chattering like a blue jay with Delia in the kitchen, would cut off the gossip mid-sentence when she slid around the Oriental screen into the room. It often amused Jean. She remembered how proper and serious Mary tried to look in her gray moire dress and white apron, and wished she knew what she had been talking about.

Father, always in a suit and tie, read the paper at breakfast. “You know that’s discourteous, dear,” Mother would say, but he read anyway, except when he was making announcements. Father always made announcements. “This summer we’ll visit Aunt Anna in Switzerland,” he’d say. Or, “I bought a farm yesterday, children. Now we’ll always have fresh milk.” Or, “Bill will apply to Yale next year.” And then he’d go back to reading without saying another word.

Once, several months after coming back from Harkness, Jean reached for her milk but moved too quickly. Her glass tipped away from her and spilled before she could catch it. She gasped. Father’s paper crackled and Mother sounded the kitchen buzzer.

“Why don’t you watch what you’re doing?” Father said.

“Mary, get something to wipe this up,” Mother said, her voice calm. “She will. She’ll be more careful next time.”

“I’m sorry,” Jean mumbled. How could he have said that? She knew why. It was nothing new. He wanted to treat her just like everyone else. Eventually, she learned to reach for her glass slowly, not quite walking her fingers across the table, more like gliding them while touching the tablecloth lightly.

One morning more than a year later, Chanteur was singing loudly right behind Father. “Can’t even concentrate to read in here with that bird screeching.”

She couldn’t tell if he was serious or joking. “He sounds pretty, Father.” She swallowed. She wasn’t used to contradicting him.

“You like birds, don’t you, Jean?” he said, less a question than an observation. “I think you’ll like the camp we’ve chosen for you this summer. It’s in Vermont and there’ll be plenty of birds in the woods.”

“Is it a camp for blind kids?”

“No. Just a girls’ camp.”

“Will Lucy go too?”

“No, she’s going to Cape Cod.”

“But how can I?”

“You will.”

Then she heard him turn the page.

Camp? He hadn’t even asked her.

Chapter Two

“I like to walk behind you, Jean,” Icy said.

“Why?”

“I like to watch your feet pick out the path.”

“Must look pretty silly.”

“No. I just like to watch it. You’ve got small feet. They look like hands in mittens.”

“Trying to find a pea.” Her hand rested on Ellen’s shoulder in front of her as the line of girls hiked through the woods. She felt the earth harden beneath her feet. That meant rocky ground might lie ahead. Time to concentrate more. She didn’t think she walked much slower than the other girls, only more carefully and probably less gracefully. Walking was a matter of trust, different from the trust she felt toward people. It was more a dependence on herself, a trust in her own new awareness. If she didn’t concentrate all the time to pick up the clues, she stumbled. And that, of course, was different than the others.

She heard twigs cracking under foot and the sound of dry branches scraping against someone’s jacket. “Hold them out for that blind girl,” someone up ahead told Ellen. It sounded awful, “that blind girl,” as if she was something to stay away from, something that didn’t have a name, as if just because she couldn’t see that meant she couldn’t hear either. A breeze made the skin on her arms tingle and she shivered. Birds chirped in the trees. “What kind of birds are those?” she asked.