Helen Keller in Love (7 page)

Just then the slap of footsteps on the porch made me stand up straight. “Where are our suitcases?” Annie had come out of her room and stood beside me, brushing her fingers against my hand. I inhaled her menthol cough.

“Peter put them in the cab.”

“Well, at least he’s learning how to treat women. Not like most men we know.” Her hand was tense in mine, and my heart sank at how sick I felt she was. Then Peter returned for us. He installed Annie in the front seat of the cab. The closing door made a reassuring thump.

He took
my arm.

“I’m sure you’re a crack navigator.” Peter guided me into the backseat. As he slid in beside me, I was oddly relieved that Annie was in the front.

I felt the car roar to life.

“Boston, here we come,” Peter yelled. The cab swerved through town. I rolled down the window. The scent of the bakery, the gas station, and then the camphor scent of the Baptist Church I knew stood at the far edge of town told me we were leaving Wisconsin for good, but then the cab came to a stop. The rumble and bustle of Appleton’s train station moved through my arms and legs.

“Train station. Time to get out.”

“Wait a minute. Aren’t we taking the bus?”

“I checked the schedules. The bus takes seventeen days. Nothing personal, but you’d die of boredom. I can’t spell into your hand for that long and she”—he jerked his head toward Annie—“looks to me like she needs to see a doctor pretty quick.”

“But you read the paper to me this morning. The local railroad workers are striking for an eight-hour workday. I won’t cross a picket line. We’ll hire a car.”

“Quiet, lady.” Peter went on, “Annie’s too sick to share the driving. And as far as I can tell you’re not exactly an ace behind the wheel.”

“You’ve got a point there.” I felt the cold air as he steadied me by the open cab door. Annie slept fitfully in the front seat. I hoped she wouldn’t wake up just yet. I didn’t want her to detect what I was feeling. I wasn’t his idol. I was just Helen. I would follow wherever he led.

All
my life I’ve wanted to fit in. I was the first blind deaf-mute to go to Radcliffe College. I thought I’d make friends with the other girls, but they avoided me in the hallways. They didn’t know the manual fingerspelling language, and I couldn’t speak to them. They gave me a puppy I named Phizz, and nights when the girls were sledding in Boston’s cold with their boyfriends, I sated my hunger for company with Annie, both of us unsure if we’d ever fit in.

Only one of my professors bothered to learn fingerspelling, and since most of my books weren’t available in Braille, Annie had to spell their contents into my hand for hours each day. During classes she sat by my side and spelled the lectures word by word to me.

On those hot summer nights, when the other girls were out past curfew, Annie slept in her room in our apartment on Boston’s Newbury Street. And I pushed away my copies of Cicero in Latin, and Molière in French, and pulled out the romance novel
The Last Days of Pompeii
. I ran my fingers over the Braille pages about the blind slave girl, hips undulating in the garden, while men picked flowers from her basket. As I read, branches scraped my window. In the night’s heat I felt strangely excited.

But Annie came into my room and pounced on me: “Caught, discovered, trapped!” She pulled the novel away. If I read books like that, she said, she would not utter one word to me for an entire twenty-four hours. Without Annie spelling into my hand in the Radcliffe classroom, isolation would surround me. I slid the book away.

Annie needed me to stay childlike.

But Peter treated me like a woman.

“Right this way, madam.” He led me deeper into Appleton’s station. Annie followed, her scent like sour rain. As we moved toward our waiting train, he said the walls above the ticket counter were peppered with posters supporting the war in Europe.

“Don’t get carried away,” Annie spelled as she walked by my side. “Most of the loafers in here are just reading their newspapers, checking their watches, waiting for trains. They don’t care about the war at all. You two can talk antiwar propaganda when we get on the train. As for me, I’m going straight to bed.”

The trees outside the train station sent sparks of pine scent into the air as Peter led me and Annie up the metal steps, while he repeated the conductor’s shout: “Last caa
aaall
for Pullman train one seventy-five to Boston.” I felt the metal door slam shut. Peter installed Annie in a sleeper car in front of us, and led me to the club car.

The train whistle shirred the air as our car moved down the track.

As I slid into a leather seat by the window, Peter passed a packet of letters to me. I felt his hand as he plied open a bulging envelope. “Your latest bills, I think.”

“Let’s get through these as quick as we can.” I drummed my fingers on the table. “And then it’s time for lunch and a drink.”

“Yes, boss.” He covered my fingers with his. “The sooner we finish these the better.”

“Helen.” He took my hand. “You and Annie run a bit of an unsteady ship.”

The train rocked so unevenly that I held the table’s edge. “You’ve been with us one full week already, and you’re just realizing that?”

“Well, I am a quick study.” He steadied me with his hand.

I breathed easier. “I’m suddenly thirsty.” The passageway thudded with the tread of other passengers lining up at the far end of the car for lunch. “Will you get us some drinks?” I could smell the coffee, the tang of whiskey sours in the club car. “And some lunch?” I pushed him toward the edge of our seat. “Let’s put these away for now.” I slid the envelope of bills back toward him.

“Your wish
is my command. If you want to deny you have problems, I’m with you. When I come back with lunch we’ll talk about what will happen during our Wrentham swim, instead.” He moved away, leaving behind a pocket of air. He would soon realize the extent of the trouble Annie and I were in. But I pushed that thought out of my mind and thought about his return instead.

I learned denial early. At age seventeen, I first felt sexual desire; it was while I was reading a romance novel. Then one morning I asked Annie about sex and she said, “Forget it. That’s not for you. Channel it into your work.” And I did. Fifteen cities in two months and I earned enough money for our house, clothes, and food. My very life depended on my never seeming different from those in the sighted world. My motto, according to Annie, was simple: never complain. So as the train shook furiously over the cross-country tracks, and I felt Peter approaching, I did what anyone good at denial would do. I picked up my paper napkin, and spread it over my lap.

I was ready for a hearty lunch. Peter handed me a lunch bag. I pulled it open, plucked out a ham sandwich, with its scent of salt and the smokehouse, and bit in. I was famished. “Read me the news?” I pushed the newspaper toward him.

While munching on his grilled cheese sandwich, Peter rattled the
New York Times
from where it had fallen to the floor. He shook it open to an article on the war wounded and read. “Listen to this. There’s this medical officer—Charles Meyers—who’s coined a new diagnosis. It’s called shell shock. It happens when soldiers—kids, really—see and hear too much death and they lose their minds. Some even become blind and mute. One seventeen-year-old in the trenches in the Battle of the Somme saw a shell explode fifty feet away; he was unconscious for days. When he woke up his hands and feet shook uncontrollably. The doctors found nothing physically wrong. Still, he was blind and mute.”

“Like me.
”

“Not exactly.” Peter’s voice moved faster as he read. I kept my fingers close to his mouth to keep up. “This kind of blindness, or muteness, is all in the mind. According to the paper, two thousand seventeen men were sent to one British hospital for shell shock.”

“Peter.” I turned and ran my fingers over the taut skin of his cheekbones. “Why don’t
you
write an article about that? I can just see it in the
New York Times
. ‘Special Report from Peter Fagan, Correspondent.’” I picked up my napkin, wiped my mouth, and hoped there were no crumbs.

Peter leaned toward me. “You’re a mess, missy.” He deftly brushed the rest of the crumbs from my blouse. I wished I had made more of a mess.

“Sure, I can write a piece on shell shock, but the
Times
will never take it. I’m just a former stringer for the
Boston Herald,
remember? Now let me clean off the rest of your pretty dress.”

“Stop that. Eat your lunch. Keep your hands off me.” I laughed. “They’ll take it if
I
ask them. I wrote for them. They’ll take it if I say so. We’ll be a team. We’ll make the money we need.”

“What do you mean, ‘we’? I’m just your secretary while Annie’s too sick to work. If you don’t mind my being so bold, it looks like the burden is on you. You’re the one who’s world famous.”

He ran his fingers over my cheek. “I love that you’re an independent woman.” He lit a cigarette, the tobacco ripe and tart.

I nodded, my jaw tensed.

“Isn’t it something?” What I didn’t tell him is that I’m more dependent than he thinks. There are some things about which I keep mute. Because I have no intention of losing this man.

“Wait.” I stopped Peter from reading more. “I think I’ve heard enough for one day.”

Peter
let the paper slide from his hands.

For the first time, we sat together without anything to say.

I leaned back in my seat and breathed in the hot air, the singed ash from the train, the acres of barley, wheat, and corn fields as we passed. And I daydreamed that Peter peeled back my dress. I arched up to him and we tossed and rolled together in a world without end. Through the night, the train-fast night.

Chapter Nine

I
n that way Peter brought alive cravings in me, like an empty mouth. To be with someone who didn’t idolize me. Who saw me as a grown woman who wanted a life of her own, instead. But I didn’t know about the cravings I brought alive in him. Some were for fame. Others for some kind of power. All were contradictions. None of them really were clear. I told Peter none of this.

Instead I betrayed my loyalty to Annie—I should have been by her side in her sleeping car; she was so sick. But no. I followed Peter, eagerly, into the club car just to sit by him that first day on the train, and the next day, and the next. I stayed by his side all the way home to Boston, then out to Wrentham, where we installed Annie in her second-floor bedroom, then we went outside, to be alone in the night air. The hot-tar scent of the street and the smoky traces of a nearby barbecue wafted toward me on the breeze. I slid my fingers into Peter’s open palm when he said, “Massachusetts has a hurricane season?”

“We never have hurricanes here.” I paused, smiling at what I knew would come next.

“Not by the looks of this place.” I felt him move his head back and forth, taking in the disheveled state of my house. “What on earth happened here?”

Through the windows opening onto the porch, I knew he saw the living room lit by a lamp. There, two ragged chairs that felt like oats, rough to the touch, faced each other in front of the enormous fireplace, a rickety table between, a Braille Monopoly game, newspapers, old books scattered across other tables and the floor, and wisps of dog hair from my Great Dane, Thora, clung to the ragged braided rug. “John used to help us keep things up. But it’s hard now that he’s gone.”

Peter
said nothing at first, at the mention of John. Annie’s husband, a ne’er-do-well who walked out on her two years ago, was Peter’s boss at the
Boston Herald
. An odd tension made him close his hand into a fist. “I know he’s your boss,” I said. “I’m not criticizing. But when he and Annie were married and he lived here, he did the odd jobs—built bookcases, put in the screens for summer. He even stretched a wire a half-mile long across the stone wall in the woods so I could walk alone. But now that he’s gone, well …” I faltered.