Helen Keller in Love (19 page)

O
ctober’s wind blew brisk the next morning. Mother and I, out for an early morning walk, passed the lopsided oak tree by the side of my house and turned into the hallway before breakfast, our faces chilled. Beyond the hallway was the music room, where a piano, a violin, and a gramophone sat covered with dust. “Annie took every last thing out of that apartment that she could carry,” Mother said. “She even had this piano shipped here, express. What could she possibly want with it?”

“It doesn’t matter.” I couldn’t stop thinking about Peter.

“Does she still play it?”

“Play what?”

“The piano, Helen.” Mother shook my wrist.

“Oh, she will, you know, for concerts and such.” We faced each other, and the wind rattled the windows. I hooked my arm through Mother’s. I couldn’t wait to get on the train with Peter, and I almost missed when Mother said, “Helen, remember when you were young, you used to try to play the piano?”

“Yes. Once I wrote that I often felt like a music box with all the play shut up inside me.”

“And not anymore?” Mother said.

I just smiled.

“Helen, did you wash your hair this morning? It’s still wet. You shouldn’t bathe in this chill. It’s bad for you. You could catch a cold.”

“I’ve never felt better in my life.”

“That’s what Annie
thought, too. But look at her now. You should be more careful.”

“I’m beginning to think I should be less careful.”

“Beginning to think?” I felt Mother laugh. “You weren’t so careful years ago when you sent that letter about—oh, I won’t say it.”

“What letter?”

“Oh, never mind.”

“Oh,
that
letter: the one where I talked about venereal disease. Yes, Mother, I did send that letter, to
Ladies’ Home Journal
, in fact.”

“What did they want with a letter on such a thing?”

“Mother, that letter saved thousands of babies from blindness. Doctors knew from the 1860s that venereal disease in mothers caused newborn children to go blind at birth—”

“I know, Helen. But no one would write about it. It
is
a delicate subject.”

“That’s why I wrote it: of all people they’d listen to me.”

“Helen, why must you always be the one spearheading things?”

The tenseness in Mother’s jaw told me it was a strain for her to be in Boston. She had to put up with my outspokenness and Annie’s temper tantrums and her illness. “Look at this.” Mother pulled a letter from her dress pocket. She spelled for me the invitation from the Mark Twain Foundation. “It’s the sixth anniversary of Twain’s death. You and Annie are invited to speak at a dinner honoring his legacy.”

I said nothing.

“Helen, this is
exactly
the type of thing you should be doing.”

“Of course, I’ll go. But I can’t leave this week. I’m going to Boston tomorrow with Peter—”

“You’ll do no such thing.”

“Mother, I know you don’t want to think about it, but I do need—”

“What? Money? From a rally? Even I know that doesn’t pay much.”

“It’s not the money, Mother.”

“Are you doing it to get away from Annie and her grief?”

And then
I lied again. “Peter and I are meeting with my publisher. They may want me to do a new book.”

“I didn’t know you were writing a new book.” Mother put her arms around me.

“You won’t believe how many new things I’m doing.”

Mother stepped back. “Why don’t you tell me? I have all day.”

“Peter will be here any minute now. I’ve got to get ready. We need to go over my speech.”

“Helen, I’m writing your sister, Mildred. You and Annie simply can’t manage here, and soon Mr. Fagan will be … leaving your employ. If it turns out that Annie does in fact have tuberculosis, I’m taking you to Mildred’s house in Montgomery immediately.”

“Perfect. I can’t wait to leave,” I said.

I need to remember happiness, because of what happened next. Rain pelted the kitchen windows, and dampness permeated the house when Annie’s scent of camphor and medicine told me she’d walked into the hall. “Helen, my room. Now,” she said. Surprised by her staccato fingerspelling in my hand, I left Mother by the fireplace in the kitchen and followed Annie. The rug was thin under my feet, the chair by her bed stiff. As I ran my palm over Annie’s face, her mouth tightened, and the narrowness of her lips made sympathy enter my heart.

“I want you to be the first to know, Helen.”

“Know? About Peter and that woman? But I do know.”

“Will you for one minute stop talking about Peter?”

“I can explain.”

“Helen, I don’t want to hear his name again until hell freezes over.”

“That long?”

“The doctor was here. Yesterday, while you were out …”

“Walking.”

“Yes,
Helen. While you were out walking, the doctor came. The results are unequivocal.” She brought a handkerchief to her mouth and coughed, coughed.

“This damned disease. They should call it the Red Death, not the White.” The scent of blood rose to my nostrils from her handkerchief.

“Three days, they’ve given me,” Annie said, her fingers unsteady. “They say I have to be there in three days.”

“Be where?”

“A damned sanatorium, in upstate New York. Here’s their cure: I go to this rest home with a bunch of other sufferers and we wrap ourselves up in woolen coats; they cart us out onto a cold porch and we breathe fresh, frigid air all day. Not for me. I’m not going there. Last week I saw a sign in the window of the Wrentham Travel Agency for sunny Puerto Rico. That’s where I’ll go to recuperate. At the very least I’ll be warm. Helen, get out of the way.” She pushed past me, and a moment later I felt the closet door open, then the thump of her suitcase on the bed. “Let’s fill this up with my best clothes. If I’m going to die I’ll be tanned and well dressed.”

“Annie, stop it.”

“Tuberculosis, the gift that keeps on taking. It’s taking me from you, and leaving you with that damned Fagan. Thank the lord your mother is here.”

Too nervous—panicked, really—to help Annie, I walked up and down her room, ambivalent. Peter loved me, promised to care for me. But I smelled the rose perfume from the gray chiffon dress Annie packed in her suitcase and I remembered her wearing it at our last dinner. I realized with a terrible ache that she would soon be gone. I put one hand over my mouth to keep the grief out.

I stopped pacing and sat beside Annie again. She had a pile of blouses on the bed, and I handed them to her to put in her suitcase. “I have tuberculosis, and John’s having a child with another—well, I can’t call her a lady—that
person
,” Annie said.

“Annie,
you know you’re the only woman in my world. Do you remember when I was eight? You were teaching me words and geography. You gave me an orange surrounded by raisins to show me the place of the sun and the planets.”

“Are you trying to cheer me up?”

“You wanted me to know about the sun’s heat. So you took me on a long walk—we walked all morning to see that furnace.”

“I took you over half of creation, Helen. That was my job.”

“The closer we got to that enormous furnace—it burned, what? Two tons of coal an hour? The closer we got …”

“The more you recoiled from it. You stopped, three blocks away, and your dress was drenched with sweat from its heat. It was a blue pinafore, the fall of 1899.”

We both paused.

“I know the real reason you took me to see that furnace. It wasn’t to feel heat like the sun’s.”

“No, no, it wasn’t.”

“It was Mother and Father fighting that day in the house, wasn’t it?”

“They were fighting. They were—”

“I felt the china shatter. I picked up the broken shards.”

“Your father said you were a drain on the family. That your mother was not herself anymore.” Annie paused. “He wanted back the young woman he’d married.”

I sat right against Annie. Our legs brushed; her shoe touched mine.

“He didn’t want a child who saddened her.”

“No.”

“He didn’t want sickness.”

“Not all the time.”

Annie put her head down on the suitcase, and I stroked her hair. Once, twice, three times I stroked that rough hair, and then she took my hand in hers and held it, like old times. Finally she said, “The strange thing was, I found your father’s eyeglasses two weeks later, high atop the bookcase out back. Did you have anything to do with that, Helen?”

“I hid
them there.”

“What on earth for? They were covered with coal dust. Your mother had to use kerosene to get them clean.”

“She’d been crying, and I knew it was because of me. So I hid his glasses. If he couldn’t find her next time, he couldn’t throw things.”

“You didn’t need to be exposed to that.”

“You wanted to keep me from suffering.”

“Yes.”

“So you took me to see that furnace, to get me out of the house.”

“I’ll never forget that monstrous heat. That day you said, ‘Did the sun fall?’”

“That’s what I imagined.”

“That’s what I feel like now. My husband has left me, had a baby. I have damned tuberculosis and am going away. I don’t know if I’m coming back.”

“If you go, who will take care of me in the future?”

She patted the suitcase, and I felt the
ssnnaap
as she fastened it shut.

“I’m contagious,” she said. “Starting now, it’s best to keep your distance.”

I felt dizzy.

“If there is a future,” Annie said, “it’s something I can’t see.”

Chapter Twenty-seven

S
sssssuuuuuup sssssuuuuup.
Lying in bed that night I felt the
thump-ca-thump
of a car coming up the driveway; I drowsed again and was awakened by the ping of rock against my bedroom window. Peter, agile but afraid of heights, had climbed the rickety rose trellis on the side of the house. When I slid open the window he climbed in. The rose thorns had torn at his sleeves.

“I heard about Annie. John called to rant and rave about her taking his things.”

“You talked to John?”

“He’s really steamed. Said she had no right.” But then Peter must have felt my hand stiffen, because he stopped. “Helen, they had the baby two days ago. Now the house is all torn up and he …”

I stood still.

“I should stop, shouldn’t I?”

I said nothing.

“No, I shouldn’t have started. Helen, I’m sorry. It turns out Annie called John this afternoon—”

“She told him about the TB before she told me?”

“You were … tied up.”

“Oh.” A wash of pleasure ran through me.

“She said she was sick, he had to come home, to take care of you like he used to.”

“She did? What did he say?”

“He said
he has a baby now, and can’t leave. But Helen, you’ve got me.”

“I’ve got you. But Mother threatened to take me to Alabama if Annie was sick.”

“She’s probably booking you passage on the SS
Savannah
as we speak. But if she does take you south, don’t worry. I’ll take you off the boat in Georgia. I’ve got a minister friend in Florida who will marry us. I’ll take you there and we’ll wed.” I felt a click as a light in the hallway went on, signaling someone afoot. He spelled even faster, “But your mother’s not taking you anywhere. Our license is ready in two weeks, anyone at Boston City Hall can marry us. You, me, two weeks from now. Are you in?”

“I’m ready.” As he started to climb down the trellis, footsteps neared in the hallway. I leaned over and kissed him and he pulled away.

Stay with me. Stay.

The next morning I plummeted out of a dream of Annie, myself, and John Albert Macy living in the Wrentham house like a family. Then I remembered it was the day to go to Boston and hastily got dressed. The sudden thump of Peter’s car bumping up the gravel drive at six a.m. made me find my way quickly down the hall, and as I reached the first floor and the front door closed behind me, I knew I had won.

No one could stop me now.

I leaned against the window the first half-hour of the long train ride to Boston, even when Peter tried to tug me out of my seat by the window to come with him to the sleeper car at the far end of the train. “You need rest,” he said. But it wasn’t rest I was after: I needed balm for my bruised heart. I had the urge to race through getting my marriage license in Boston, skip the rally on Boston Common, and get back to Annie.

“Why so blue? Come on,” Peter said, pulling me away from the window. “Annie’s a fighter. She’ll be back in Boston in a month, she’ll shake this thing.” Peter suddenly stood up. “I’m still learning this secretary trade. I got us the tickets to Boston but I forgot to bring food. Coffee? Rolls? The club car’s open.”

I reached
for my bag and pulled out my wallet.

“No, Helen. We’re going to get our marriage license. For God’s sake, I can pay for a couple of sweet rolls.”

“You’re my sweet roll.”

“Sweet I’m not.”

“Right. You’re actually quite tart.”

“You’re the tart,” he laughed, and I felt him nuzzle my bare neck. A flood of memories came to me from the cherry tobacco scent of him opening me, opening.

I leaned back in my seat, remembering how Peter had pushed my cream-colored skirt to the floor. Peter’s hand drifted to the inside of my thigh.