Helen Keller in Love Read online

  “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

  They 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.”

  For eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, for over twenty years Annie had spelled into my hand. She got migraines now. Her trachoma made her eyes burn so that she picked at her eyelids till her eyelashes fell out. At that moment a cough racked her again; at times that cough seemed a relief, if only because it would give her the smallest time away from her endless duties with me.

  I felt Annie push the heavy mailbag across the table, closer to Peter, its ssshhuh making the table vibrate just slightly beneath my hands. A slight shift of air followed by the scent of ink told me Annie had pulled out a newspaper. “The Boston Globe,” Annie said, handing the paper to Peter. “Read to her.”

  “Ah,” spelled Peter to me. “I’m your voice.” His stomach rumbled. “My appetite will have to wait.”

  “You’re her link to the world,” Annie said. He reluctantly slid the newspaper open and turned to his job as secretary.

  I felt lit and burning as a fuse.

  Peter licked bits of cherry-apple crumble from his lips, rearranged his tie, his mouth moving fast under my listening fingers when he read of the Red Sox in the lead for the pennant—maybe they’d finally win the World Series, the bums!—then suddenly his lips turned to pools of sorrow, as he flipped to the world news:

  SPECIAL TO THE BOSTON GLOBE BY NOAH SANDER

  SOMME, FRANCE, JULY 5, 1916 - Yesterday, 57,000 British soldiers were killed in one day at the Battle of the Somme. Tens of thousands were wounded. The battle rages on.

  “What a stupid war!” I burst out. Peter’s fingernails pressed into my palm as he read, more furious, then softer in sorrow. No one wanted to hear my opinions about politics, world events, or Socialism. And certainly not that I was against this war, and urged all Americans to stop President Wilson from entering this foolish waste of human life in the name of capitalism. The Brooklyn Eagle said that as a blind woman I had no right to speak about politics, but Peter’s hand warmed mine and I heated up in rage. “President Wilson,” I said, “is as blind as I am. Fifty-seven thousand soldiers killed in one day in France? For what?” The battle in Europe raged. And even though the United States remained neutral, daily President Wilson called for our entry into the war. Weekly my desk was piled high with desperate letters from German, French, and English soldiers blinded in battle, letters pleading for help.

  Peter laughed at my comment about President Wilson.

  “Why, Miss Keller,” he spelled, “you’re calling the president blind?”

  “Why not? He promised peace, but now there’s talk that he’ll raise the U.S. military from one hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand in the next year. Is he blind to the consequences of that?”

  “I’m a radical, too, but he is the president.”

  “And I’m Helen Keller. I’ve met with every sitting president since Grover Cleveland,” I spelled into his palm.

  “I know, I know. You were the darling of kings and queens by the time you were ten. They kept abreast of your activities in newspapers worldwide: how you could read Homer, and they all saw that photo of you posed so quaintly with your little white dog. Your Radcliffe graduation was front-page news in 1904, and Dr. Edward Everett Hale wrote that your future upon graduation was unlimited.”

  “You …”

  “I’m not a crack reporter for nothing. I’ve done my research.”

  We sat together, the mailbag giving off its musty canvas scent. I didn’t want to tell Peter there was one thing that was very limited in my life.

  Men.

  Foolish, I know. But I believed love would be like the romance novels I secretly read. As I traced my fingers over the Braille print of those books, I knew my lover would be torrid. A darkness at his core. I would struggle against him, try to keep him away, but he would win my love by his kindness: he would know without my telling him just how to take care of me. I had dreamed of it. I can tell you now that in romance novels women have little power. I had too much. I didn’t know that a man doesn’t want to compete with a woman. They want to shine, to be the real star.

  Peter rattled the mailbag so its inky scent rose to me. “Helen, can we get back to work here?” he spelled. “You rant against President Wilson. But it’s a wonder the U.S. government hasn’t thrown a net over you yet. Don’t you know that people are being tarred and feathered out in these parts for speaking up against the war?” His hand felt jittery, excited in mine.

  “Apparently, Mr. Fagan, you haven’t kept up with the news. Wisconsin’s Senator La Follette is against U.S. involvement in the war against Germany. When he spoke out last week Teddy Roosevelt called him a skunk.”

  “Teddy Roosevelt is rich, and famous. And you are …”

  “Famous.”

  “Well, one out of two isn’t bad.”

  I can’t remember a time when I was not famous. After Annie taught me my first words when I was seven, she wrote to Michael Anagnos, the head of the Perkins School, of my success: the Fifty-Sixth Annual Report of the Perkins School, published worldwide, called me “a phenomenon” and “most remarkable.” The news of my “miracle” spread. Religious leaders said I was proof of the purity of the human soul. Alexander Graham Bell called my progress “without parallel.” The Nation profiled me. Half of Tuscumbia visited my house. Reporters swarmed at my door, even while we slept.
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  I was ten years old.

  Stories of me were carried around the world: soon President Cleveland had invited me to the White House, I was enrolled at Perkins for free, and overflowing crowds met me wherever I went. By the time I was sixteen Andrew Carnegie had invited me for dinner. I wrote my autobiography as a sophomore at Radcliffe College, and when it was published Mark Twain called me “a wonderful creature, the most wonderful in the world.”

  The truth is, I was never unknown, but often lonely.

  I reached for Peter’s hand.

  Then I felt him reach into the bag and pull out a letter. It gave off a dampness. He tapped the contents of the letter, from the sister of John Beutler of Cologne, Germany, into my hand:

  Miss Keller,

  My brother John, he quit the typewriter factory at sixteen to fight in the war. Sent straight to the trenches and into the French line of fire. But Miss Keller, he didn’t die.

  Only woke up in a hospital blind.

  Help him.

  Sincerely,

  Hannah Beutler

  Peter pulled away—but I edged closer to him. I felt my long nights of blindness invade the life of this boy, this soldier, and I burst out impulsively that the Germans loved my autobiography, The Story of My Life. What if I give the profits of the German edition to soldiers blinded in the war?

  Peter dropped the letter, leaned forward, and put two fingers on my cheek.

  “If you give money to blinded Germans, you’ll be marked,” he said. “I told you, Socialists are being arrested left and right for protesting the war.”

  “I’m doing it. And when you next come back,” I said, “mark the rest of me.” At that moment I was doubly blind: I didn’t realize how my fame would protect me, but in the months to come Peter would have no such protection.

  I took out a Braille pen from my bag sitting on the chair beside me and scrambled through it to find a piece of notepaper to write my letter right away. “What are you doing?” Peter asked. “It’s too dark to write.” Then I felt his hand pause, until I laughed.

  “Watch me,” I said. While I pressed the pen to mark the page, Annie walked up to the table and leaned in, tracing her hand over the Braille letters to my publisher, telling them to give money to the German soldiers.

  Peter pressed toward me until I felt his approval of me glow like grass. I knew then that I would cling to him. I was not foolish—I was terrified that Annie would sicken and die, that my mother would be the only person left, that I would be sent to live in the cold, dark cell of Alabama.

  But I wanted to be loved, and this was my chance. I am yours I wanted to say as Peter traced his thumb in my palm. My two-dimensional world ballooned out: rounder it felt, smoother, larger.

  I breathed in fully for the first time.

  After we devoured our dessert, Peter led me past the hotel’s grape arbor and into the grassy expanse by the lake’s edge, where, he said, a wooden windmill creaked and groaned. We stood there together, unsure of what to do next until I said, “Annie needs me. I have to go inside.” When Peter led me past the windmill it turned at a full surge as he and I puffed and panted up the hill toward the hotel.

  Chapter Four

  “Helen, don’t be foolish,” Annie spelled to me moments later when Peter and I reached the hotel’s front porch. She was waiting there for me, and the floorboards gave off that queer midwestern scent of whiskey, prairie dirt, and corn. Annie shook my arm and said again, “Foolish girl. You can’t afford to give money to anybody.” I stood between Annie and Peter, the willows that circled the hotel cooling my arms, and regretted that I’d just told Annie I would donate money from my autobiography to German soldiers blinded by the war.

  “We barely have enough for ourselves,” she said, her hand heavy in mine.

  “You’re tired,” I spelled, my fingers erratic in her palm. “Are you all right?”

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  But I interrupted again. “Where’s Peter?” I turned toward the street, where the rumble of cars shook the porch. “Has he left?” Annie’s palm tightened under my fingertips, telling me her temper was about to flare. From the first day that Peter and I met—even though she hired him to help—his very existence rattled her. It was partly that I might be taken in, but it was more that she might be replaced.

  “Hold on,” she said. Her footsteps receded to the end of the porch, then I felt the sluicing of the porch swing. The swing, Annie showed me that morning, hung from the wooden ceiling from two metal hooks. The clink of the swing’s metal chains against them now grated the night air and suddenly mixed with the scent of sulfur and cigarette smoke.

  I tilted my head toward the swing. Peter was in it, surely, slouched into the swing’s cotton cushions, his fingers on the cigarette as he inhaled the smoke.

  “Now,” Annie said when she came back across the porch and took my arm. She led me inside the hotel’s heavy front door. “He’s far enough away so we can talk.” She sped me across the lobby, and as we rounded the corner by the coffee shop I stiffened. Through an open window Peter’s scent of smoke drifted toward me as we passed. I wanted to stop there, but Annie hurried me toward her room, all the while talking as we walked rapidly down the hall: “If you give money to Germans—Germans, Helen, even blind ones—the press will have a field day. I can see the headlines now: ‘Helen Keller, Traitor.’ Then who will come to hear our talks? We get paid to do them, remember? We get paid by the number of tickets collected at the door. Helen, come on. We barely have enough money to make it back to Massachusetts at this rate. If you give money to Germans, believe me, it will be much worse.”

  I turned to move farther down the hall to my own room, but Annie squeezed my hand harder. “What’s going on?” she demanded, leaning against the doorjamb of her room. “What gave you this idea?” When I said, “Peter,” she leaned forward. “Why did you talk about this with him first, and not me?” Her voice under my fingertips slightly oily, the color of dark.

  I felt the whoosh of air as she pushed open the door to her room. The scent of the coffee cup she’d left on her bureau mixed with the tang of her leather suitcase just inside the door. “Watch your step.” I knew Annie was sloppy and she warned me about her clothes on the slippery bare floor, and with her hand looped in mine, she kicked the clothes aside, led me in, and rapidly closed the door. “Stay here.” She crossed the room to the small desk sitting by the far window, came back, and said, “Look at this. I’ll show you how crazy your idea is.”

  She had scooped up a loose sheaf of papers from her desk and now handed them to me. “Helen, listen.” She read them quickly. The top letter said, “American Investment Warning: Stocks at a Loss, Balance Zero.”

  Then Annie said, “Listen up, Helen. If people stay away from our talks and our stocks keep falling …” She paused. “We won’t be able to keep our house more than another few months.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll fix it,” I said.

  But Annie pulled my hand as if to shake me. “Face facts, Helen. Your father stopped paying me my salary twenty years ago, when you were ten years old. He was supposed to pay me until you were eighteen, but you know his will made no provisions for my salary. And you didn’t get your share after he died, even though your sister and brothers did. We’ve paid our own way since you were twenty-three, by God knows how many lectures, your books, that yearly money from Carnegie and Sterling. But it’s different now. I have this damned cough day and night. You may have the strength to cross the country still, six months of the year. But Helen, I just don’t.”

  At that moment her cough seemed like a retreat. Some place safe where she could stop living our life, ignore our troubles, and just be alone. From the open window by her bed came a breeze so cold it tightened my chest, but I kept Annie’s hand in my own.

  “Keep this in mind. Peter will cost us plenty. But we need him here if I’m too sick to work.”

  At the mention of Peter’s name I wanted to run from Annie’s side, just to
be near him.

  But Annie’s scent of defeat called me back.

  She led me across the room to the bed by the windows and sat down.

  I turned toward her. “Stay with me,” Annie told me. “It’ll be all right. It’s probably just a scare.” But I pulled my hand away and moved to the window facing the porch. Its glass cool under my fingertips. The glass trembled with the vibrations of a train hurtling across the countryside just past the hotel. I imagined I was on the train with Peter, moving into the night with him. Instead I walked back to the bed where Annie sat and took her hand. She needed me so much. Was it wrong for me to want Peter—any man, really—to help me find a life apart?

  The train in the distant woods left a taste like iron in my mouth.

  One thing I never said was how tired I was at times. What people respected most about me was my stamina. Especially that summer of 1916 when we fell into debt. Annie and I never liked paying bills, never liked to feel their envelopes, and now that our lecture tour was a failure because I kept talking against the war, we needed our investment returns; without them we couldn’t pay the maintenance on our house that August, or for the rest of that fall. Still, we never missed the chance to buy a new fur on Newbury Street instead of paying the water bill or the mortgage.

  Why didn’t we have enough money? Andrew Carnegie gave me a pension every year. The Sugar King of Boston, John Spaulding, gave me stocks to protect my welfare. Even Mark Twain, whom I met on a warm Sunday in New York, at a lunch in the home of Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence Hutton when I was fourteen, got his friend the “robber baron” Henry Rodgers, of Standard Oil, to help pay for my college education. I had no debt from those years.

  But as I sat in the upholstered chair next to Annie’s bed, I knew the truth was that Annie was dependent on me for a living, and all the money we made from lecturing, from my books, went to protect her and pay for my secretaries. Annie and I both needed food, clothes, a new roof on our house, and all the people we required to keep me looking “normal” in other people’s eyes.