Helen Keller in Love (2 page)

P
eter Fagan was
a miracle I was not prepared for. On a hot Wisconsin night, midway through my lecture tour across the Midwest, the warm scent of corn, pond water, and dirt filled the tent where a crowd of farmers waited for Annie to lead me up the steps and call out the story of my life. As I stood at the base of the three wooden steps leading to the stage, I gripped the stair railing—its cool metal vibrated with the shuffle, then stomp of heavy boots, an angry tint to the air. The crowd had been waiting for a half hour.

“I can’t do it,” Annie spelled into my palm. “I just can’t.” A cough rattled her chest, and she doubled over beside me.

The steady vibration of impatient feet shuddered the ground, and I stood holding the railing.

I felt desperate, hollowed out inside. This cough kept Annie awake nights, made her skin damp as constant rain, and exhausted her so badly that for the first time since I was a child, she couldn’t climb the wooden steps to the stage; she couldn’t translate for me day and night as she always had for thirty years.

“Write to John,” I spelled into her hand as she struggled to lead me up the stairs toward the rickety stage. “After the show. Please. He’ll help. I know.”

“John wouldn’t help me if I were the last woman on earth,” she spelled into my palm.

“He’s still married to you.”

“Married? He’s a husband in name only. He lives in his own apartment in Boston with that deaf hussy. At least she won’t have to listen to him blabber on, like I did for fourteen years.”

“Annie,” I spelled into her damp palm. I felt a whoosh of air as she pushed back the stage curtain and led me out toward the waiting crowd. “He
must
help. He’s all we’ve got.”

On the
stage Annie cut short her introduction of me. Her hand shook in mine as she called out to the crowd, “I bring you Helen Keller, the miracle.”

One thing no one tells you about being blind and deaf is this: You say what people need to hear. You leave out the rest. After our lecture, Annie walked me across the dusty road from the tent to our motel and sat me down at my Remington typewriter. “Maybe a flunky from John’s newsroom can help. But God knows he won’t respond to me. You’ll have to do the writing.” From the warped desk in our Appleton motel I pressed my fingers onto the typewriter keys. I didn’t write the whole truth. I wrote what John needed to hear:

I didn’t write that the mayor of Wichita, Kansas, had refused to shake my hand when I told him I was a Socialist, or that we slept in drafty motel rooms to save money, Annie so ill she coughed into the morning.

A week later, over a breakfast by the train station on the way to our next town, Annie spelled John’s telegram into my palm:

The thought of being alone with a stranger, a man, was illicit, and thrilling. All night during the long train ride through Wisconsin, I imagined my fingers tracing his cheekbone as he moved his face close to mine. The train rocked beneath me, and as I slept I dreamed Peter’s scent clung to my skin: a scent of woods and heat that made me feel deep in my being that he would change my life.

The night Peter arrived, Appleton, Wisconsin, smelled of rain. Annie and I sat despondent over the failure of that night’s audience to listen to our Chautauqua lecture when Peter slid into the billowing, creaking tent—in the night his scent came easily to me: I inhaled typewriter ink, cigarette smoke, and the strange muskrat smell I always associated with men. I held the edge of my chair and felt his footsteps as he swung closer to the stage where Annie and I sat. Annie shifted beside me, saw him, and spelled her impression into my hand: “he flips open a brown reporter’s notebook, waves a cigarette with thin, long fingers.” I lifted my head, sensing electricity in the air.

“Is he handsome?” I asked, nervously smoothing my hair.

“All I can say is thank God you’re blind.” We both laughed.

“Is he that bad?” I spelled back into her hand—familiar as my own. I cocked my head. Peter felt closer. Annie said, shifting in her chair, “He’s looking left, now right.” Annie went on, her fingers flying in my palm: “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, his
shirt
is unbuttoned. And he’s got that shifty look of a person ready to flee.”

“Flee?” I leaned closer to Annie.

“His family fled Ireland,” Annie went on. “The famine. He’s a Socialist now,” she told me. “Another supporter of lost causes—like
you
.”

We both laughed again, but I felt a slight mocking in Annie’s palm. “Do I look all right?” Always I’ve liked men better than women; even at age seven I’d ask Annie to make me pretty. Now, dress tugged down just a bit, I sat up straighter.

“He doesn’t see you,” Annie rapped. “But he
is
looking. He’s turning this way. Dark hair, he’s shaking his jacket off his shoulders, and oh, brown eyes.” Relief washed through me as Peter rounded the table. Through the soles of my shoes I felt the
sssaah, ssaah
of his boots until he swung up to the table and grasped my hand.

“Miss
Kel
-ler, a
pleasure
to see you.” I touched his throat to hear his words and felt a twinge, very slight, that moved to the center of my heart. His voice, rough as twine, thrummed through my fingertips. I felt incapable of taking my hand away. Warm air pressed down inside the tent; the thump of footsteps told me that the crowd was filing out. Still, Peter waited for my response. With my ring finger on
his vibrating larynx and my forefinger on the rough stubble of his cheek, I felt his parted lips with my thumb. A pent-up energy moved through me. Annie always told me, “For God’s sake, Helen, when you’re touching a man’s face, move fast: Read his words, then drop your hand. People gawk at you enough without seeing you lingering over some man’s drawl.”

But Peter drew me
in
.

“The pleasure is
mine
,” I spelled into his rough palm.

“The famous Helen Keller,” he repeated. “Engaged in making the world a better place.” With a quick flick of his fingers in my palm he spelled, “I’ve been following the press on you: a sold-out lecture tour across Canada in 1914, and now this current tour—two lectures a day, twenty-five cities, three different states since you left Wrentham last spring. All in the service of raising money for the blind. Am I right?” That night, under the hot dome of the tent on Wisconsin’s lakeshore, I grasped Peter’s hand in mine and felt the delicacy of his fingers.

But Peter didn’t know the whole story. The truth was harsher. Our tours—including this one—were to raise money for the blind and deaf, yes. But how could Peter have known that my father had stopped paying Annie’s salary when I was ten years old, and since my graduation from Radcliffe College, Annie and I had done our show in too many cities to count to pay the bills. We had to keep ourselves afloat.

“I’m so glad,” I blurted out. “That you’re here to help us.”

He just threw his head back and laughed, his throat a lush drink of creamy milk. “Yes, I’m engaged in the important mission of taking over for Miss Sullivan and getting you two safely home,” he said. And I believed him.

Peter turned to Annie. “I’ll take her to dinner if you’d like.” As always when I’m with two people, I held Annie’s hand with my left hand and listened as she spelled. At the same time I held my other hand to Peter’s lips and lip-read his response. His mouth moved quickly, excitedly under my fingers; Annie’s spelling—usually up to eighty words per minute poured into my palm—was weary.

Peter
looped his arm through mine; he led me through the tent robust with the odors of farmers, dirt tracked in on their shoes, and the scent of machinery still in their clothes. And when Peter said, “Watch your step,” I knew we were about to cross from the inside of the tent to the rough, patchy grass outside.

Just as we stood at the tent’s edge the cool night air hit me: it was filled with the vibrations of the dinner bell—pulsing and fading on Lake Bally’s shores.

“Let’s eat,” Peter said beside me. “Are you hungry?”

“Starving,” I said right back.

The steady thrum of the dinner bell chimed in the night air. As I felt its vibrations in my hands I hesitated, then stopped on the threshold of the tent.

Before walking out into the night the bell stopped tolling, leaving a fist of empty air—and I can tell you now what I did not know then: that bell was just like Peter. Booming with joy. But soon empty. Gone. I held his hand more fiercely in mine.

I live in a tangible white dark. My blind world is not shot through with blue, sultry green, or shouting red. But neither is my world black. It is not a casket; it does not close over me like death. No, my world is more a deep fog, rough to the fingers, the color of flesh.

That’s what I spelled into Peter’s smooth palm when we stood together at the threshold of the tent that Wisconsin night. He’d just asked me what everyone wanted to know but was usually too polite to ask: “What’s it like to be blind?” he’d said. “To live in the dark?” We waited for Annie to catch up; she had gone backstage to get our paycheck from the Chautauqua tour manager. My stomach rumbled with hunger; beneath my feet I felt the resounding smack of hundreds of people striding out into the night from the tent: the rapid, sharp
thonk
of their feet across the grass telling me they wanted to get away; our talk was not what they had wanted to hear.

“It’s not dark
,” I said again. “It’s more like something I can touch.” I didn’t tell him my whole body is a vibroscope: I remember conversations with my fingertips. Instead I leaned back against a metal tent pole as he said, “Stay here. I’ll go find us a table for dinner. They’re setting up outside the hotel across the street.” And when I leaned back, alone, I felt the air splinter, crack open a bit, as Annie, far inside the tent, was racked by a fit of coughing.

The tent pole shuddered under my hands: I couldn’t go to dinner until Annie, or Peter, came for me. In new places I couldn’t walk alone; I needed a guide. Through the soles of my shoes came the vibrations—first soft, then more insistent—of Peter’s footsteps as he came toward me across the grass. I reached out for him; he took my hand with great happiness and he spelled, “How did you know it was me?”

“I can tell people by their scents,” I said.

“All right, nature girl,” he spelled to me. “Let’s eat.”

All the way across the lawn to our hotel, where tables were clustered in a patio facing the lake, I felt like I could touch our shadows—Peter’s tall and lanky, rough to my fingers, yet blending into mine, into one.

Chapter Three

T
hey say that love is blind. But fame can blind a person, too. That night Peter led me across the grass outside the Chautauqua tent to where rows of metal tables behind the hotel were stacked high with food: country hams with salt, yeasty breads, the sharp, green scent of peas, even the iron scent of radish floated past as he sat me down under the cool of a trailing willow tree. I moved my fingers over the slim knife, rounded spoon, plate, and thick-rimmed tumbler atop a rough place mat. Immediately “seeing” them in my mind’s eye, I picked up chicken, beets, grilled corn from heaping platters. Peter, his dark hair curling down his neck, eagerly took his place beside me when I touched him in the heat of the night—he was a slender, regal animal. “I’ll feed you,” he laughed.

“I’m blind and deaf,” I spelled back. “Not dumb. Do you think I can’t feed myself?”

I knew I wasn’t the woman he expected—and I liked it. Chicken in hand, I offered Peter a taste and he opened his mouth to bite.

“Stop.” Annie had crossed the grass from the tent and put her hand on my arm. Peter lowered his chicken leg to the plate. “Before you eat, you work,” she said to Peter, all the while rapidly spelling her words into my palm. “First, you translate the daily newspapers, then the correspondence. Got it? If a newspaper comes, you spell it to her. A letter: the same thing. You translate everything—and I mean everything—conversation, radio news reports, bits of speech on the streets as you pass by—into Helen’s hand. You can start with all this mail.”