What Is Visible: A Novel (3 page)

Chapter Two

D
octor pulls me onto his lap in the leather chair by the fire after supper; he is wearing his flannel robe, and I am wearing mine, because a shiver of winter runs through our apartment. He takes a walnut from his pocket—he always keeps some there for me—and lets me squeeze the nutcracker as his hand waits below for the prize. No other nuts please me like this one: the shell is the hardest to crack, and the meat is deeply ridged, each half different. Doctor says they are shaped like tiny brains, and like the nuts, each brain is different. Phrenology, the study of the bumps on the skull, is Doctor’s favorite hobby, but he tells me that I am too young to learn it yet. He drops the nut into my open mouth. That is our agreement—if he lets me open them, I have to eat them—but tonight, he gives in, as he sometimes does, and takes the other half I tap against his teeth. He allows my fingers to travel over the face I know as well as my own: the strong, wide brow and bushy eyebrows; the straight perfection of his nose between the deep-set eyes; the bristly fur of mustache half covering his upper lip. And his beard, Doctor’s beard—I could spend an hour curling each hair around my finger.

“Enough,” he signs on the hand he pulls from his whiskers. “Oliver is coming tomorrow.” I write nothing, as if I have no concerns. “Spending the night in town before they deliver him.”

My parents did not
deliver
me to Doctor; he came to Hanover and took me. Papa did not even walk us out to the carriage; his last touch was when he pried my fingers from the doorframe.

“Your blue dress,” Doctor says. I am dressing for a blind? “Invited the newspapers.”

“Oliver isn’t famous.” Not yet, anyway.

“Historic, your meeting.”

“Like you and Longo?” The first time Longfellow and Doctor met, they talked for eight hours straight.

“No,” he writes. “A meeting between two of God’s best creatures.”

The newspapers are not coming because Oliver and I are two of God’s best creatures, I know that. “Like General Tom Thumb and the Feejee Mermaid?”

He puts another walnut in my hand, and together, we crack it open. “You hurt my heart,” he writes. “Barnum is a showman.”

He sits so far back in his chair that I almost fall off his knee. I lift his hand from the arm of the chair to write my “sorry,” but he balls both hands into fists. We sit still together for a moment, as we often do, but this time the stillness is full of Doctor’s disappointment. He lets me uncurl one fist: “I will help with Oliver.” He pulls me close to him then, my head settling in the familiar nook between his neck and shoulder, and I am his own little mermaid again, swimming in his warm waters.

The hall is crowded. The boy has come. For once, I try to stay back, invisible, leaning against the cold marble. Miss Swift writes that Doctor is pointing out the luxuries of our new Institution: the long, curving stairways; the carpeted, high-ceilinged rooms (Swift says you could stack five of me and still not touch the chandeliers). It’s so fancy because it used to be the Mount Washington House Hotel. My first years, we were still in Mr. Perkins’s house downtown on Pearl Street, but now here we are on Bird Lane in South Boston overlooking the bay. What a world away, Doctor tells the crowd, from the nearby House of Industry for Paupers and Orphans and the Boylston School for Neglected and Indigent Boys.

I figure he’ll go on for hours with such an audience, but then Swift tugs me forward. Doctor writes “Oliver” and then places the boy’s fingers on my eyeshade, and on my ears, and then upon his own. I can’t tell from the child’s movements if he understands anything at all—who knows? And then, without warning, Doctor pushes me smack into the boy’s chubby arms, our faces so close that I feel the air sucked quickly in and out of his nostrils as he sniffs me. It is violent, it is rude, but still I wish I had that talent. I do not struggle, but I do not embrace him, either; I hold myself up as tall as I can, and I am taller than he is, his bangs swishing against my cheek. I tense as Doctor lifts my arms, but allow him to put them around the boy. It’s like holding one of Cook’s potato rolls risen with too much yeast and come to life. His hair is as downy as a girl’s one hour out of the bath.

Suddenly, he drops to the floor, and I am afraid he is after my shoes, but he scuttles away from me. There is a jarring, and then Doctor pulls him up beside me, and everyone is jostled about. I search for Swift’s hand, and she says that Oliver felt the warm air blowing from the grate of the furnace beneath his feet and knelt to inspect it with his tongue. It’s true that there are no furnaces like the one Doctor had built especially for us, but it is not worth
licking
. I can’t stop laughing; I don’t care if his parents hear me. I was worried about a boy, and here they have brought me only a dog to play with. That’s good then! I have long wanted a pet, as long as he is not too hard to clean up after. Poor Doctor—I wish I could see his face—does he show the embarrassment I am certain he is feeling?

He has recovered, though, and he puts my hand in Oliver’s. I don’t resist my pet. The fat, little fingers grip mine, and he trots forward, pulling me with him down the long marble hall, though of course he has no idea where he’s going. He is off exploring the walls, the floors, jerking me this way and that, and he shakes with laughter at everything. Is Doctor sure the boy is not an idiot? No one in his right mind could possibly be this jolly about touching doors and walls. I remember the great terror that seized me when I first arrived, when everything and everyone was new and strange, and I had no way to
know
any of it, for good or for ill, except through my fingers. But Oliver doesn’t even tremble, except occasionally with delight. Maybe he is not afraid of anything because his parents are here with him. Does he know they are going to abandon him within hours?

Swift and Doctor rein him in, and they are now beginning the official tour. Swift says they’ll start with the boys’ dining room. I rush ahead to brush each of the six long wooden tables for crumbs. I wonder if I should check with Cook to make sure she is presentable, if Doctor decides to show the kitchen. Thank goodness Oliver is a boy, and won’t be at the table snuffling through his food between me and Tessy. Next I throw open the heavy doors of the gymnasium, and spread my arms wide so the visitors can take in everything: the climbing ropes, the ladders, the yardarms, and mats. Even the director of the Pennsylvania Institution for the Blind was shocked at the wonder Doctor created for us, and how rough-and-tumble we play in it. I’m not big, but I can wrestle most of the older girls to the ground, though I have been barred from such play temporarily for biting. I have excellent teeth. The people are moving around the room, and I would climb the rope all the way up for them and pose in the warmth of the sunshine from the top dormers if I had on my romp skirt and tights.

Doctor is behind me, his pocket watch thrumming through his waistcoat against my back as he presses close. “Tell the gentlemen from the
Herald
and the
Evening Transcript
what you think of Oliver.”

Doctor offers me the slate to write on because there are too many hands to talk to, and I freeze:
he is a dog, he is a dog
is all I can think. Puppy? No, he is a boy, a good boy—what did Doctor say? He is a creature, he is God’s creature. I remember something Swift’s brother was going on about last week, and I think it might sound nice. “Oliver is the lamb of God,” I write in big letters, and hold the board up for all to see. The floor vibrates—not applause, it seems, but low laughter—and Doctor grabs the board. I don’t understand. Lambs are sweet and gentle; it is a much greater compliment than the boy deserves. Swift stops me as I try to go upstairs with the group. I know Doctor will be showing the students’ rooms in the boys’ wing, and I want to see if Oliver gets a room by himself like mine in Doctor’s apartment.

“Doctor wants you to stay,” she writes.

“Why?” I know I did nothing wrong, yet there is a little burr of worry beneath my skin.

“Wrong to call Oliver lamb of God.”

“Everyone likes.”

“Not a real lamb,” she writes. “Bible symbol for…”

I wait, but she doesn’t continue. Swift does not communicate well, like Doctor or like me. “Give me Bible like the blinds. I’ll learn it.”

Swift holds my hand more gently. “I try, but Doctor says no.”

I won’t be able to wait much longer, because God is the one person in the whole world that I have the most questions for.

True to my word, I am helping Miss Swift
attempt
to teach Oliver, but he is a very dull scholar, just as I forecast. A hundred times a day for the last month, I have moved his fingers from the metal raised-type labels for
fork
,
spoon
, and
pen
to the actual items, and back again. A few times he has been able to imitate my motions, but then he seems to forget and goes back to his fidgets. Doctor says that within two weeks, I’d already matched the labels of over fifty objects and was on to arranging the individual letters into words. Oliver didn’t come down with the fever until he was three and a half, more than a year after I did, so Doctor thinks he should remember more from what he heard and saw. He was talking a blue streak by then, his parents said, and yet all he does now is make pantomime gestures. He finally does understand that, like him, I can’t see or hear, so he pats my hand or my face when he wants my attention. He has different pats for
good
,
bad
,
stop
, and
hungry
. I am sure he will never learn real finger spelling. At first I didn’t like it myself, but then Doctor told me that each handshape not only represents a letter of the alphabet, but also stands for a particular prayer taken from a book written by a Spanish monk over three hundred years ago. If a monk was too sick to recite a prayer, then he would just make the handshape for it. I like to think I am constructing words and sentences out of prayers, though I am still not sure that God receives them.

Doctor worked with us the first weeks, but then he got frustrated with Oliver, and now he’s gone to New York to raise money for the school. That’s what he says, anyway, but I know he is visiting with Julia Ward. He used to say that New York City was only fit for vermin, but last week he didn’t laugh when I made a rat joke about the Ward sisters. He has made more trips there in the last months—four, to be exact—than he has ever made before. “Are you counting?” Jeannette asked me, and I said, “Yes, ma’am, I am.”

Before he left, Doctor told me that he is impressed, however, with how Oliver is taking to workshop with the other boys; he has already woven one manila doormat and is working on a basket. I wish the girls got to go all the way to the East Fourth Street workshop every afternoon, walking holding hands along the water. I would tie the biggest, most comfortable mattress in the world for Doctor, and beat all the boys at chair-caning too. Instead, I must stay here with the blind girls knitting and sewing, washing and ironing, until supper at six. Those things are better practice to fit us to be good wives and mothers, I’m told. We are kept from the boys—or more likely, them from us—for everything except assemblies. I have only had occasion to meet with them then, and I am pleased with our separation because their touch is rough and their fingers grimy. Only Oliver is allowed to mix with us girls, and I help keep him very clean, going over his face and hands regularly with a wet rag.

Of course, I have my Laura dolls to practice mothering, all ten of them, the twelve-inch likenesses of me that are sold across the country, with their eyes poked out and little green grosgrain ribbons tied over the eyeholes. I sent Mama one for my baby sister Mary, and Mama wrote that the doll looks just like me. Pretty, Mama said, and well-formed. It is such a treat to touch myself, to run my fingers down my tiny nose and up and down my smooth legs beneath the dress. I wish that the fingers bent so we could have conversations, though I know they wouldn’t be real. Still I write in my favorite Laura’s hand sometimes, secrets and stories. I know which one she is because she is the only one whose hair I wrap up in a bun and tie with ribbon like a lady’s; the rest have hair that hangs loose and straight down their back like mine. I can’t wait till I can twirl it back and carry it on top of my head like Julia’s. I used to let some of the older girls hold tea with me and all the Lauras, but then last month after tea with several of the girls and their dolls, I did the count and there were only nine Lauras. I understand the others would be jealous not just because I have more dolls than they do—most have only one—but that my face is so famous that little girls everywhere want to play with me. To show that I am generous, I gave Tessy a Laura on the condition that she not change her name and that she sleep with her every night. Sometimes I sleep with Tessy too, a Laura nestled between us. Every night before I go to bed, I brush each one’s hair with a miniature brush the mayor’s wife gave me, and on waking, I smooth their long white dresses. I ask Swift if any of their dresses are dirty from sitting on top of the armoire, even though I dust them with a feather duster every week, but she always says no. She’s just lazy and doesn’t want to help me with them. Swift asked if Oliver could join Tessy and me at doll tea on Sundays, but I said, “Of course not, he’s a boy, he might break them.” I am their mother, so I am responsible for their well-being.

Even though I won’t let Oliver play with my dolls, I’m very careful with him, like a mother; I make sure he doesn’t cut himself on the sharp edges of the metal labels, but today I slit the tip of my own index finger on the label for
book
. I tried to clean it up, but Swift said I was just making more of a mess. I wish I could have seen my blood, which Doctor says is red, dripping all over Oliver’s desk, and maybe even splattering Oliver. I couldn’t tell how much there was, but my finger was very wet, the bandage soaked through in five minutes. It doesn’t actually feel bad to get a small cut. I think having my whole arm chopped off with a sword would be awful, but this little bit, this little hurt, fills me up inside in a way that is quite nice. I slip the metal label into my pocket.