What Is Visible: A Novel (30 page)

H
ands on me, so many hands on me, and voices fluttering in and out. Years have passed—no, decades—since I have been so quiet. It is all right because I am tired, so tired. Julia’s hands, worried and sweet, the only hands that traveled the true north and south, east and west of my body. My girls’, panicked and damp, pulling at my covers. And the one I refused to see, now I will never know the child’s face, half-mine. Sammy does not yet touch me, but he will and without end. He waits, as does my Charlie, just beyond my reach, but soon to be mine.

And then the most familiar fingers, writing in my palm, and then across my forehead, words I cannot follow. Her fingers are enough; I do not need to know their meaning. I have always known their meaning, their endless font of desire, tapping, tapping, always there.

Suddenly, Laura speaks—I know it is her—softly at first, and then so loud that her voice fills the room. Not the noise she made for my name. This is Laura
speaking
, and the voice is different from the one I’d imagined all these years, husky and grave instead of high and light, the most beautiful and solemn sound I have ever heard. “You are mine,” she says. “I have always been yours.” Now she is laughing, the sweetest laugh, echoing until I hush her with a kiss. We have finally closed the breach. I can hear the mute speak and be heard by the deaf. I knew this day would come.

I am beginning another life, separating myself limb from limb, thought from thought. In another life, Laura and I―

J
ulia wreathed her husband’s bedstead in her white bridal veil. He hadn’t been well for months, but the end had come so suddenly that she was numb with disbelief. Yes, he had been seventy-five, but she had always expected him to outlive her by sheer force of personality. How he must have argued with the Lord when he was called home, and heaven help the angels. His hair and beard had grown bushy and wild―he hadn’t let her at him for over a year―so now she trimmed them for the laying-in, careful as always to keep his hair long enough to hide his enormous ears, which he’d always been shy about. She didn’t touch the waxy skin or the frozen lips, the stiff limbs in his best suit. Only the hair seemed still alive, that beautiful, thick mane gone gray long ago, and she combed her fingers through the strands, parting and reparting it, fingering his cowlick, grabbing it in greedy handfuls until she realized she’d been sitting there for hours, his hair clutched in her fists.

Chev was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge beside Sammy, with a plot waiting for Julia on the other side of her son. At the funeral, it was Laura who wailed the loudest, that horrible, unearthly keening as if echoing straight up from hell. She threw herself on his coffin just before it was lowered into the hole, pressing her face into the boughs of white roses, and if Julia hadn’t grabbed her, she might have gone down with it. She pulled Laura to her feet, and they all saw the blood streaming down her face from the wounds of the thorns, and yet Julia took the girl in her arms anyway―she still thought of her as a girl, though she was nearly fifty―and Laura’s blood spotted Julia’s black veil. How she longed to feel the embraces instead of her children, who stood close by, but they were more reserved in their mourning.

At the memorial service later in Boston Music Hall, she read not one of her own poems, but John Greenleaf Whittier’s tribute to her husband, “The Hero.” Hundreds had turned out, from strangers to the friends they had left who had not preceded Chev. Thank God Sumner had died first; he would have been as helpless as Laura in his grief. The students of Perkins sang hymns and Chev’s successor, Michael Anagnos, spoke at length of Dr. Howe’s accomplishments. Julia still hadn’t recovered from Anagnos’s marriage to Julia Romana. The truth was she’d thought the girl lovely but ultimately unmarriageable, cursed as she was with a nervous and melancholic temperament far worse than either of her parents.

At home, Julia did nothing. She was now relieved of all demands and edicts from Chev, and yet she felt no urge to pick up either book or pen. And lately her vision had been going, and at night she could barely read even with the help of a lamp. In her worst moments, she imagined that this was the Lord’s punishment for her repulsion for the blind, the children who surrounded her, and for her unkind thoughts―and sometimes actions―toward Laura, the epitome of the damaged and helpless among them. The only thing left to attend to was the reading of the will, which Chev’s lawyer would bring in a couple of days.

In the last weeks before her husband’s death, she had, at his request, had her double bed carried into his chamber and placed beside his, close enough that they could both stretch out their arms and hold hands until he fell asleep, and his hand released hers. Three nights before he died, she had been in her room at her desk preparing for a lecture, this one on ethical polarities in nature, when she heard him call out for her to rub his feet. It was late, half one, and she was almost finished, so she told one of the servants to attend to him. When she finally came to bed, he was asleep. The next day, when he was taken out for his walk, he went into convulsions and collapsed, never to open those blue eyes again. She knew that it wouldn’t have made a difference if she had gone to comfort him in the night, and yet she kept hearing him call her name, over and over, his voice raspy with irritation. She had not gone to him because she was still so angry over what he had told her the week before.

That night, he had reached for her hand in the darkness and said he had something important to tell her. When she tried to get up to turn on the lamp, he pulled her back down. He was still so strong, no matter how he complained. Julia honestly believed this was just another one of his spells, when he would take to his bed and demand to be waited on hand and foot, preferably by his wife, who would then be forced to miss all of her suffragist meetings and lecture appointments.

“There were women,” he said, and she tried to wrest her hand away, but he held fast. This she had long suspected, but had never expected for him to confess. She thought of the weanings of her six children, how she had kept him away. Had there been one whore for each of her pregnancies?

“How many?” She craned her head toward him, but in the blackness she could see nothing of his face. Only his voice, steady and sharp as a dagger.

“The details don’t matter,” he said, and she wanted to leap out of the bed and force him to tell her, her nails on his face, her hands on his neck. But instead she lay still, her hand limp and wet in his.

“Then why are you telling me?”

“It is selfish,” he said quietly, “but I am selfish. One I deeply regret, a girl of low station when you were in Rome, who bore a child, my child.”

She thanked God she was lying down; otherwise, she might have fainted.

“And there was one I don’t regret, an affair of the heart long-standing, which only ended with her death ten years ago.”

“Did I know her?”

“Yes.”

She combed her memory as if for nits: sidelong glances, interrupted conversations, awkward meetings, but came up with nothing. At least it had not been Laura. She would never have recovered from that. She thought of the final letter she had written to Mr. Wallace; she had learned of his death before she could mail it, but she had saved it and read it again and again over the years, as she did the letters from him, even unto this day.

“My Diva Julia, I knew you’d understand because of your Mr. Wallace,” Chev said as if he were reading her thoughts, and abruptly let go of her hand.

She started to protest and then decided she would keep the truth to herself, that she had never actually been unfaithful, only desperately in love. Let her husband believe she was as sin-stained as he was.

Just the year before, Julia had declared in
Woman’s Journal
that suffragists were really typical Victorian women, who sought the comforts of home, but also the striving for freedom. She had asked “that the door of human right might open widely enough to allow us to pass through, bearing our babes, not leaving them, assisting our husbands, not forsaking them.”

Should she have forsaken him?

Two days later, the lawyer arrived and the family, along with Laura, gathered in the parlor for the reading of the last will and testament of Samuel Gridley Howe. He had left his estate to be divided evenly among his children; his papers to the Perkins Institution, under the guidance of Michael Anagnos; and a two-thousand-dollar bequest to Laura Bridgman. To his wife of over thirty years, he left nothing. Julia wrote the words into Laura’s palm even as the pain of it all nailed her to her seat. Was this his way of punishing her for her alleged affair, despite his many? Or was he simply giving her what she had always begged for, the right to earn money on her own from writing and lecturing?
Passion-Flowers
, over the years, had made close to three hundred dollars, the most successful of her poetry collections. She wasn’t afraid―her work and, if necessary, her children would support her―but if only he had told her the why of it, the wound would not feel so deep, the infliction so cruel. And she had waited for the revelation of a sum left to his bastard child, but the will mentioned nothing. She would not tell her children that they had a half-sibling somewhere out there in the world, probably poor and bereft, although at that moment how she longed to besmirch her husband’s memory, but even more, just to set the truth straight.

At a conference the following year of the New England Woman Suffrage Association, of which Julia was founder and president, she told the assembly, “In my youth, we thought that ‘superior’ women ought to have been born men. A blessed change is what we have witnessed.” Freed from the man who had bestrode her life like a colossus―the man she realized in the end that she had loved above all others―Julia Ward Howe was, at age fifty-eight, finally glad that she had been born a woman.

A
nother Irish from Tewksbury! And they’ve stuck her in my cottage, almost as if they know I have an affinity for such. But not this one, alas, even if I could bring my heart to heel once and for all about Kate, which I doubt will ever happen. It’s not a beneficent God giving me a second chance at passion, because this girl is only fifteen and practically spits nails. I do know from Kate how much life in an almshouse can crooken a soul, even if it does not break it, but this one has come out fighting like a cock.

“Be patient with her,” Anagnos says. “Annie is an orphan,” he tells me. “Her brother died in the almshouse, and to boot she has only partial sight.” That’s why she’s gained a bed here; apparently she pleaded her case to Frank Sanborn, head of the State Board of Charities and a close friend of Doctor’s, when he visited Tewksbury. She must be pretty. I tried to touch her hair and face, but she actually smacked my hand away. No one has ever done that! I asked Jeannette, “Does she know who I am?” And Jeannette said, “Yes, indeed.” I tried again when she was sleeping, or I thought she was sleeping, just to get a feel for her hair, to see if all Irish hair is a dense forest like Kate’s, but I’d barely snared a lock when she grabbed my hand. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to touch that head, a fact that is nettling me much more than I’d like. It is my job to teach her the manual alphabet, and for that she eagerly allows my hand in hers. She is the quickest learner I have ever encountered. Within days, we are conversing as nimbly as I do with Jeannette or any of the older blinds, though her manners are still bad. She is boorish, impatient, and never greets me when she comes into the cottage.

“Lived here all your life?” she asks, and I tell her all but the first seven years.

“Like prison or home?”

What cheek. Of course Perkins is my home.

“Have family?”

I tell her they are far away, and she says at least they’re alive. Well, some of them.

Annie confides that at Tewksbury, she was placed in the ward with all the pregnant women, and she learned “everything” from them: of trysts in closets, perversions in alleys, children abandoned on doorsteps, or worse, disposed of. I’m not shocked, but I hadn’t truly understood the dark underbelly of the world Kate had come from; now I feel that I am at last gaining entrance into her circumstances, the plot that framed our short romance. It strikes me, hard as a slap, that she could have abandoned our child, but she did not.

Apparently, the deadhouse was still on the grounds of the almshouse, and Annie had seen more dead bodies than she could count, including her own little brother, Jimmie.

“Sister Mary died also,” I tell her, and we exchange details about our siblings. I show her the Emily Dickinson poems I have memorized; she has not heard of her, of course, as Miss Dickinson has never published a single book. As I have jousted with mortality, the poems and their obsessions now resonate with a deep and forlorn ferocity, which they didn’t hold for me before, and Annie is taken with them right away. It is these particular verses that provide the most comfort to us both:

Annie has grown on me—and apparently I on her—because now she lets me stroke her hair, which is not as curly as Kate’s, but is still a delight. She allows us but a minute of such intimacies, however. The girl can’t brook much tenderness, as if she were afraid it might make her weak. It’s just as well; I don’t think I could stand a misadventure at my age. Only once has she come to me for genuine physical comfort. About six months after she’d arrived, she pushed her way into my bed in the middle of the night. “Scared,” she spelled, quivering against me. She’d had a nightmare about the Horribles, the deformed men who hobbled to the dining hall at Tewksbury to eat alone like animals. Every day at the blast of a whistle, she watched with the others the procession of the burned, the legless, some with faces hideously distorted by tumors or goiters. Annie knew she should feel sorry for them, but still they terrified her. I approve of her moral sense, but at the same time, I wonder how objectionable she finds me. She can see well enough to be disgusted when I remove my glasses to wash my face and clean out my eyes over our little basin in the corner. She has probably even seen the raised scars on my arms and legs, those tiny, jagged relics of my passions, when I change from dressing gown to day gown. I’ve waited for her to ask, but she hasn’t. It has been a long time since I have had anyone to really talk with, and this girl, I know, can handle truths that those twice her age cannot. If I’d had more of my senses—even one—I think I might have been more of the tiger, like Annie.

Annie has been here almost two years now, but the other girls still mock her: she’s Irish, Catholic, and from the almshouse—a triptych of the most dismal. Her strategy is to be rude to them and to her teachers, something I well understand. I think Doctor would have enjoyed her, and Anagnos enjoys her until she pushes him to the brink. Last week, he almost expelled her—for the third time—for going to a rally for General Butler, who’s making his fifth try at governorship, this time on the Democratic ticket, when she’d said she was going to the Eye and Ear Infirmary. I spoke to Anagnos on her behalf, telling him how learned and insightful the girl is, and what a wonderful boon she’s been to me thus far. Annie is the one who sits beside me and translates as the teachers read from the newspapers every night. It had never bothered me before that they read to us only from the
Transcript
and the
Post
, but Annie complains that we are getting only one side of things, their side. Now that she’s had an operation, her vision is good enough to read the
Catholic Register
, and she expounds on various political and social issues sometimes until late in the night. She tells me that Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the recent telephone—a device I cannot even fathom—has successfully devised a system to teach the deaf to speak. He has set up his own School of Vocal Physiology and Mechanics of Speech right here in Boston. Annie says that she will accompany me if I want to attend, but the sad fact is that I gave up that dream long ago—it was far too painful to continue to entertain the fantasy—and it seems impossible to begin its recovery at this late stage. What a breathtaking possibility, though, and so I encourage Annie to learn all she can since she plans to be a teacher.

Annie loathes Julia, who teaches a class in Greek drama. She calls her the “grande dame” and lampoons the way she declaims. As much as Annie makes me laugh, I feel inclined to take Julia’s side occasionally. Our friendship, though a slight and twisted skein, has even withstood the shocking news that while Doctor left two thousand dollars for my care, he left his own wife nothing. The betrayal must be remarkably painful. I was so grateful for his bequest, especially since my own father gave me nothing, and yet equally puzzled that he should so dishonor his own wife. Their more than thirty years together must have been much fierier than even I’d imagined or, frankly, hoped. Julia is forced to go on tours reading from her essays and poetry to support herself, an irony since her desire for public acclaim was the thing Doctor hated most. Once again, I realize I do not understand this man who held dominion over both our lives.

How swiftly the years have passed between me and my needlework, the occasional worldly visitor, and Annie for entertainment. It is time to graduate her and she has been named valedictorian from her class of eight. Doesn’t sound that much of an accomplishment, but Anagnos is making quite the ceremony, with Julia surprisingly at the helm. Hundreds will be coming to the Tremont Temple, including the governor himself. But no one has paid attention to the girl’s costume and she has not two pennies to rub together, so she asks to borrow one of my dresses. She is not so thin as I am—no one is—but she comes close; I can tell from our embraces. She has only two calicoes, a dark and a light, and one silk for church, though she despises church and only goes to vespers with the three other Catholic girls. After two years, she refused to go to Mass any longer and told me that she let the priest know she had absolutely nothing to confess. It’s not that she prefers the Unitarians or the Baptists, on whose behalf I admit I’ve tried to proselytize a bit, but that she thinks of God as just one more authority figure on whom she must turn her back. I do not have that option.

I let her go through my dresses—there aren’t that many—and tell her she can pick any one she’d like. I sit on the bed while she tries them, my skin prickling at the fact that she is nearly naked before me, only a few feet away. She is not Kate, she is Annie, but she rouses in me something both soft and hard that I must put down. I am, after all, more than twice her age, not that that would matter if I were a man. I wonder if she has any awareness at all that I am trembling so close by as she slides the garments on and off. I doubt it. Finally, she chooses the white muslin, the one I was baptized in, and we take it to Jeannette to add a blue sash. Her hair is fixed in a high pompadour with ringlets curling at the sides because Anagnos remarked that she favors President Cleveland’s young ward, Frances Folsom, recently married at the White House. I’m not sure if Annie is dressing as the famous belle as a joke or if her vanity is truly primed. It’s difficult to tell with her, though her manners have vastly improved, or improved at least when she so chooses.

Julia writes Annie’s speech out into my hand, and it is more beautiful and impressive than even I had thought she was capable. A few lines make me reflect upon my own case: “To a certain extent our growth is unconscious. We receive impressions and arrive at conclusions without any effort on our part; but also have the power of controlling the course of our lives.” I have helped her, this half-blind Irish from Tewksbury, and she has helped me in return, the extent of our growth vast and unconscious.

I enjoy being feted. Though I am not well, keeping to my bed more days than not, it is more than worth it to rise for this occasion. Anagnos I have spoken of perhaps too harshly, for in this he has a splendid idea: a co-celebration of my fiftieth year at Perkins and my fifty-eighth birthday, which also happily coincide with the 1887 Christmas season. The event has been announced in all the papers, and apparently I am the talk of the town again, however briefly. It is not the most appealing that everyone should know a lady’s advanced age, but there you have it. Anagnos has even paid for a new dress and bustle for the day, made of the black wool I feel suits me best now, but I did allow for a jaunty silk fanchon with a short veil. And I asked the seamstress please, please, for a feather, for I have never had a feather on a hat. “What color?” And straightaway I said, “Peacock.” I’ve read they have fantastic long plumes topped off by shimmering iridescent eyes. Imagine that: Laura Bridgman sporting a tall, bright feather from which one brilliant eye peers over the crowd. Perfect. My spectacles will still serve me beneath the veil, of course, but when I tried on the fanchon, I felt quite liberated knowing that I presented a more mysterious and perhaps even alluring visage to the world. Would that I had had this hat for Doctor’s funeral! But I will be photographed ceaselessly tomorrow at the party, and so my delightful hat will be recorded for posterity. I wonder how many pictures of me already exist. There is no point in me owning any of them because the photographs themselves have no texture, nothing for me to glean at all with my fingers. They should make raised pictures just as they make raised books. I’ll bet Doctor would’ve tried it if I’d had the idea then, but Anagnos is not the risk taker his predecessor was.

He is not bad, I suppose, though he seems to spend most of his time in the pursuit of money for the Institution, and very little time with the children. He has trotted me out to raise funds for printing more books and then again two years ago when he decided to open a kindergarten here. For that one, he asked me to appear with a blind translator—two for the price of one!―to plead with the crowd for donations. Honestly, I did it because I don’t have much to fill my days, and I do like to be onstage. I think back to the days when several hundred crowded in here just to see me, to watch me write on the French board or to pick out places on the embossed globe. Those were the loveliest days, although I didn’t know it then.

And so tomorrow will probably be the last of such wonders. Anagnos says he is expecting over five hundred, and Julia herself will preside over the ceremonies in the music hall. She has taken much interest in the Institution since Doctor’s death. Like me, she has always enjoyed the spotlight, which Doctor had preferred shining brightest on himself.

I sit in the place of honor on the dais, in my favorite velvet chair brought up from the parlor, with Julia on one side and Anagnos on the other. Vibrations all round, not only hundreds of feet, but also the beats of music. A group of blind children from the kindergarten have come onstage to sing me a song. Julia writes it out:

A nice enough song, I suppose, but it could have been written for anyone. Julia gets up to speak and Anagnos translates, but I must admit that I am disappointed to find that it is as much a tribute to her husband as it is a celebration of my accomplishments. Am I never to be seen as separate from him? The speeches continue from ministers and philanthropists—the best of Boston has shown for me today—and even Edward Everett Hale speaks, saying that my education provided knowledge of “the great unseen.” A good name for me. My own dear minister from South Baptist speaks of my conversion and my passion for Christ. I know this does not go down well with all the Unitarian bigwigs assembled, but he is the one person I insisted be part of the day. He declares that I am one of the few who can truly be considered “a bride of Christ.”
Ha!
He has no idea that I did not save myself for Jesus, but let him think that the black spider is a bride draped in white. I pull my veil a little lower.