Helen Keller in Love (8 page)

“I hardly know the man.” Peter stretched his fingers and traced my palm. “Besides, he
was
my boss. You’re the boss now. In fact I’m taking the train into Boston tonight to pack up my apartment. Annie rented me a house nearby so I can be at your beck and call from now on.”

“And don’t you forget it.” I was so relieved and excited that he would be near that I didn’t even mind if he noticed the living room ceiling: after a storm, while Annie and I were away on a lecture tour last year, great patches of water leaked over two-thirds of the ceiling, leaving it a sodden, dark, tea-colored brown. She had fingerspelled the disaster into my hand.

“Here’s what I don’t understand,” Peter said. “It’s you and Annie, traveling the country to paltry audiences this year, as far as I can see, yet you’ve got this house, and me, and if I’m not mistaken there’s a servant inside lighting the lamps and primping himself, eager to see you the minute we walk in.”

“And?” I was ready to be more honest than I should have been. “You want to know how I manage this? How a deaf, blind woman in 1916 can afford her own house?”

“Something
like that, yes.” He smelled of clover and fresh-cut grass. I would have said anything.

“This house cost me my life,” I said.

“What?”

“You know.” I waited. “The book …”

“Oh,
The Story of My Life
.”

“Paid for it,” I exhaled. My autobiography had been published to critical acclaim when I was only in my twenties.

“Looks like you bought this place in the halcyon days.” I felt his fingers peeling the decayed paint from the windowsill. “Spent money you couldn’t afford. But that’s not the strangest part. Let me get this straight. You wrote the story of your life when you were what, twenty-five?”

“Don’t age me.” I gave him a poke. “I was twenty-two.”

“Tell us all about yourself,” people urged. So I wrote
The Story of My Life
when I was a college student. The tale I told in my autobiography was one of utter triumph: of how Annie, then the Perkins School for the Blind, then Radcliffe, all carried me closer to the shores of the normal, sighted and hearing world. Books were my dearest friends, I wrote, making up for the lack of human company. But for all the success of that book, underneath there were so many things I never said. A dark jealousy burned. I tried so hard, in my writing and my books, to seem exactly like a normal, hearing and sighted person that I never showed how discouraged or disappointed I was at times. I wanted to show perfection.

Later in life I wrote, “What I have printed gives no knowledge of my actual life.” Strangers, the people closest to me, no one liked hearing that.

I felt Peter pivot so my hands moved from his chest to his back. “Okay,” he said. “You’ve got twenty-four acres, some outbuildings that seem to be sinking into the earth—”

“They’re not that bad,” I interrupted.

“Well, the
roof needs repair, even the lawn needs mowing. But this place really is something,” he tapped into my palm. I felt his fingers spell
I’ll see you tomorrow
. “No offense,” he added, “but I hope Annie needs a long mending period before she takes over again. I’m beginning to like this job.”

“I’m beginning to like being the boss.”

“Have I told you how much I like a woman in charge?” He pinched my lower back hard, sending a jolt to my skin. “Do that again,” I said. “And you’re employee of the month.”

Pain is a dark star in my life. It’s always been with me. Even now, thirty-five years after I lost my hearing and sight, I still remember the burning, like a fireplace poker turned around behind my eyes, at nineteen months old when my fever broke, and I was going blind. Day by day, the sunlight pierced my eyes like fire. Slowly my sight burned to ash. Nothing left. My fingers still ache with the felt memory of how fiercely I rubbed my infant eyes of pain.

And my blue eyes? The ones you see in my photographs? So bright and clear that reporters say they are mesmerized by my gaze? They’re glass. I had them put in during an operation when I was a young woman so that I could look more normal, less blind.

But no pain is like the one I had when I went to Annie’s room our first night back in Wrentham and realized she knew I wanted Peter near me, and that she had made plans to send him away.

The truth is that it was Annie alone who really knew me. She read my moods instantly. With a touch or by a look I was exposed to her, like a child. After Peter left for the night I walked carefully inside the house and, touching the hall table, then the velvet loveseat by the far wall of the entryway, found my way to her room. Slowly, I went in.

The queer aluminum scent told me that Annie sat up, alert in bed,
and the shrill pock of her fingers in mine once I crossed the thick-rugged floor to greet her was like an electric shock. With great force Annie threw back her quilt and told me to sit down. She must have run her eyes over me—the top buttons open on my dress, the heat in my face from being with Peter—because she said, “Sit down, now. You look like a chicken about to be plucked.”

“Don’t you mean a flower?” I idly picked up the bristle brush on her bedside table and started brushing her hair. “Your hair’s so tangled it’s like a pelt.” She bowed her head. I tugged the brush through the knots.

“Animals have pelts, Helen. Not humans.” She kept wanting to teach me, even though I was no longer a child.

“You’re curled up like an animal, a hurt one, in bed,” I spelled. Her bathrobe was matted beneath my fingers when I touched her sleeve; the breakfast tray on her bedside table gave off the odor of untouched eggs and cold coffee.

“Careful or I’ll bite.” Annie made a snapping motion with her mouth, and I was so thankful she forgot about Peter that I laughed.

“Do that again.” I held her to me.

She leaned back so I could brush more. Her shoulders, thick with muscle, weight, and worry, sank beneath the even strokes of the brush. Gradually, her breathing slowed.

The familiar scent of just we two together made the thought of Peter fade away.

Vaguely, then more strongly, a childhood memory came to me. I am seven years old, sitting at Annie’s knee in my bedroom in Tuscumbia, Alabama. Annie is filled with nervous energy: it is my first Christmas since she arrived. Annie, in order to tame me, had taken me from the house where I lived with my mother and father, and moved us into a two-room house, where just she and I lived. Every day she taught me words; every night I slept, a child, by her side. She was nineteen, an orphan. And that Christmas day she wrote a letter to her former teacher—a Braille letter I later read. In it Annie crowed to her friend, “With Helen, I have found someone who will love me completely—and can never leave.” And I never wanted to leave her, until Peter.

Annie
sat up, took the brush from my hand, and said in the eerie way she had of reading my mind: “You were to be with me on the train. Instead you were alone with him—Helen, after everything I said, you’ve disobeyed?”

Before I could protest she said, “It’s done. I’ve sent for your mother. She’s already left Alabama by train; she’ll be here in a week. She’ll stay with you, every minute of the day, mother hawk that she is, until I’m better.”

“You sent for Mother? From Alabama? Without talking to me first?” I turned my head toward the window; a steady shake-shake of the floorboards told me the Boston-bound train thudded through the far woods. Peter was on that train, due to return the next day to Wrentham and the house Annie had rented for him, to be close to me. Every cell of me filled with anticipation, hummed with it until the train rushed over the slight hill behind our house.

“I thought you rented a house so he could be near.” I steadied myself by holding her bedpost.

Annie’s hand was sweating and silent in mine.

“I changed my mind.” She turned to lie back again, exhausted. “Too many things are changing around here, Helen. When your mother gets here everything will go back to normal.” Annie struggled to sit up. “When Peter gets here tomorrow I’m telling him I’m back in charge. He has to stay away.”

But even as I touched her soft hair, my fingers filled with love for her, I wanted to tell her the truth: Before Mother arrives, I will make my move. Nothing will stay as it is.

Chapter Ten

I
n the books I’ve written about my life I never told the whole truth. Once Peter and I came back to my rattletrap farmhouse outside of Boston everything changed for me. I know I wrote about how Peter and I had a “little isle of joy” in our love together, but I don’t think—no, I
know
—I never wrote that I did it this way: I betrayed, cut off, lied to, people I loved.

Here’s another thing I never wrote in all those books: I would do it again.

It was the second day we were back. The heat was sweltering. King’s Pond gave off the scent of wet acorns and oak leaves as Peter pulled me toward the wooden cabin set in a grove of pines by the shore. “Come with me. For a minute.” The ground gave way in soft pockets under my shoes as he led me toward the cabin. I stumbled over the rocky path, the damp air of the woods around us. Peter pulled open the cabin door and the musty odor of bathing suits and picnic baskets reminded me of summers on King’s Pond.

“We’ll tell Annie—and your mother when she gets here. Just not yet,” Peter said.

“But when? We can’t hide out here all day. The second Annie sees you she’ll have you driven to the train.”

“More like she’ll have me shot.” Peter laughed. “I saw her myself at breakfast. If looks could kill, you’d be digging my grave right now.”

“And get this dress dirty?” I picked up the hem of my favorite sassy blue dress. “Sorry, but you’d have to call the undertaker yourself.”

“Your concern
is touching. Still, we have to tell her.”

“Tell her what, exactly?” I cocked my head. That morning over a hurried breakfast of oatmeal and blueberries in our kitchen, Peter dabbed at bits of blueberry staining my mouth as I told him Annie wanted to replace him.

“We’ll tell Annie that I’m staying put. The rental house is mine, I’m your private secretary, and that’s that.”

“And that’s because … ?”

“That’s because we’re …” Peter stopped.

“We’re what?” I was still a post-Victorian woman. No matter how much the people Annie and I knew preached free love, I still couldn’t claim a man as my own.

“We’re …” Still he waited.

“Comrades? I do have a Bolshevik flag hanging in my bedroom.”

“Then you must be armed. May I frisk you?”

“Only if I can frisk you back.”

“But we’re not comrades, we’re not a couple.”

“No.”

“Not in love.”

“Definitely not that.”

“We’re … interested parties.”

“What are we, lawyers?” I laughed again.

“Lawyers?” Peter’s voice turned rough under my fingers. “They commit about as much high crime as bankers, in my book. We’re definitely not lawyers. But we are adults. Two consenting adults.”

I bit my lip so I wouldn’t say more. I’d gone too far. What was I consenting to? I understood Peter didn’t see the complexities of my personal life. He could never really take on the responsibility of caring for me.

“Maybe there are no words for it,” I lied, smoothing Peter’s hair. “But whatever we tell them, at least we’re in this together.”

“Right.” He pulled me toward the cabin. “Come inside.”

“Lead on.”

Something
was wrong inside that cabin. I can tell people’s moods by their hands: a shy hand gives off a tentative feel; a bold, brash person’s hand vibrates with fervor. And the liar? The liar’s hand shifts and trembles while the liar’s words say yes, but the hand says, “Don’t listen to me.” I trust what people say with their hands. People control their faces, they don’t want to show their emotions to the world. But their hands? I’ll say this. They give a person away.

I trusted Peter’s hands. I trusted them on me.

But I also trusted how they shook, ever so slightly, that day.

He leaned me against the warm wooden wall and said he wasn’t afraid: with his hands on me he said we would tell Annie and Mother that we were a couple, that he’d stay on as my private secretary, their wishes be damned. But his hands had the soft, marshy feel of someone wanting to flee.

It was his hands that told me what to do next.

“Can you be quiet?” Peter backed me up against the cabin’s wooden wall where every summer I’d hung my bathing suit on the third peg. Far off, I could feel the thrum of a motorboat crossing the pond.

“Can
I
be
quiet
?” I laughed back. I wanted Peter to undo the seedlike buttons of my silk dress. But he reached behind me to grab my bathing suit.

“Why don’t you take off this pretty dress, and put this on? It’s about time I got that swim you promised me.”

“I never break a promise.”
My flirtation was working
.

“I can only swim in circles,” I said, as we headed out into the warm air and across the sand to the pond. “Mostly I just hold on to the raft.”

“So hang on to the raft. It’ll save me from having to watch you. I’ve got to work on my tan.”

“To
look good for me?”