Helen Keller in Love
Read Helen Keller in Love Online
Authors: Kristin Cashore
Helen Keller
in Love
Helen Keller
in Love
ROSIE SULTAN
VIKING
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in 2012 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Copyright © Rosie Sultan, 2012
All rights reserved
This is a work of fiction based on real events.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Sultan, Rosie.
Helen Keller in love / Rosie Sultan.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-101-58061-5
1. Keller, Helen, 1880–1968—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3619.U455H45 2012
813′.6—dc23 2011039574
Printed in the United States of America
Designed by Carla Bolte
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
ALWAYS LEARNING
PEARSON
To my
husband, David Rudner, and our son, Gabriel Sultan,
who mean everything to me.
I am so blessed.
Helen Keller
in Love
Chapter One
I
wait
under a night sky pocked with stars I cannot see. I lean forward on the porch, the
chrr-chrr-chrr
of crickets thrums the warm air that vibrates against my skin; the wooden railing I hold feels cool after the day’s heat. The night around me is a bitter cup of ink, drained into my cells. Those weighty caverns of water under the earth—hungry mouths, waiting to take me in.
I cannot account for my behavior.
I have lied—to my teacher, my mother, the world. I hid from them the second miracle of my life this fall night of 1916. Because I have a secret.
I’ve never told this story. I don’t know if I can tell it now. But it’s a story I have kept out of all the speeches I’ve ever given and every one of the books I’ve written. Yet it’s the truest story I’ve lived.
Thirty-seven years old. Deaf, blind, mute. I have taken a lover, and I am in love. I can’t publicly marry because my teacher and my mother forbid it—it is their only hope of keeping me close.
But I defied them. I lied to Annie. I was tired of being perfect Helen Keller. Helen the pure; Helen the tireless worker, the saint, the good girl. I wanted to break free. And it happened very suddenly. Last summer I met a man who awoke all sorts of demons, mad cravings in me. A man who tasted like night.
Since October we’ve been secretly engaged. This is the night we will elope. I’m ready. Beside me sits my leather suitcase as I wait all through this steamy Alabama night on the porch of my sister Mildred’s house in Montgomery. I wait in silence—nothing new to me. But this silence, this dark, is not a casket; it is an opening. Life calls from the tangy woods at the edge of my sister’s house. Woods from which Peter will creep under cover of night, take my hand, and race me off to Florida, where a minister friend waits to marry us.
The night gets cooler around me, and the silence deeper. One hour, two, then four hours pass. Yet I know he will come. The people who know me best—Annie, my teacher; Mother, asleep on the second floor—could never have imagined I would deceive them, or marry and have someone to care for.
The longer I wait here the more the woods give off a vicious scent as morning breaks. I had crept out of my upstairs bedroom, suitcase in hand, at two a.m. and waited in the rocker by the piney railing for four hours, my listening feet pressed to the porch to feel the
thrum
,
thrum
,
thrum
of Peter’s footsteps.
I waited even as my sister Mildred heard me rocking, and got up. She woke her husband, who told her not to be afraid—it was only me on the porch: Sister Helen, he called me. They didn’t know I kept in communication with Peter Fagan; that I packed my leather bag and came down to wait for him as they slept. This is the story you will never read about in my books: how Helen Keller waited all night on this porch to elope with her lover.
Here’s the date I’ll never write: November 27, 1916. Did Peter sense trouble, and decide to stay away? Did Mildred’s husband pay him off? Or did the men come to blows in the woods? Did Peter fight back, push Mildred’s husband away, saying, “I must see Helen. She belongs with me?” Doesn’t he know I am waiting, will wait some more—will keep waiting even as this bitter sun rises—hoping to feel his footsteps on the stair? He must come.
Burning, the Alabama sun. People ask me: How can you tell the difference between night and day if you are blind? I tell them that night air is lighter; day feels heavier, more sodden with life. And as I stand up, pick up my suitcase, admit to myself that maybe my lover will not come, this air of daylight weighs more heavily on my skin than any blindness ever did.
My throat is a red knot, unraveling. I can’t go back in the house to Mother and Mildred. The sun rises like a plume of smoke, trailing until daybreak comes and the silence deepens more than any I have ever known.
I am alone. Still, he still may come … Because we had an extraordinary, passionate affair. When I think about it now, it makes my breath move fast, fast, like a train …
Chapter Two