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Finally I said, “We’ll send the mother a check. Annie and I send money to people like this every day.”
“For what? To help this one woman, yes. But that won’t stop the problem.”
“Then we’ll send money to the British League for Blind Children.” I handed Peter the letter; a slight shudder told me he opened the file drawer to drop the letter in.
“Damn these selfish capitalists. They just want to wage war. Don’t you get it, Helen? Don’t you see how one donation won’t really help this boy?”
It took Peter a minute to realize I wasn’t going to say anything.
I kept silent about the hundreds of checks Annie and I sent out every month, every year, to people who pulled us aside on trains, in the streets, in hotel lobbies after our talks, saying they needed money for someone they loved who’d lost their sight, the truth was we sent money all over the place. Even when we didn’t have enough for ourselves.
“Poor kid,” he said finally. “What he’s going to suffer.”
“Poor mother,” I said right back.
Mother, mother. The image of my own mother—even then on a train heading north—came to mind. But I tried to banish it. I can’t think about her because when I do it is like thinking of a long night. A cool night, at times. At times light with a breeze. But underneath, thunder clouds and the threat, always, of a storm.
I can’t remember losing my eyesight, or my hearing. That was my good fortune—to forget those days and nights of fever, of pain. But Mother? She remembered it all. It was seared into her, made one with her flesh: the minute she passed her hand over my eyes and I did not blink she said to herself, “It is finished.” A kind of dusk fell around her, too. Sometimes, with the birth of her two other children—my sister, Mildred; my brother, Phillips Brooks—or on her travels with Annie and me across the country, that dusk would lift. But most of her life was lived in a shadow of grief that she couldn’t save me. The intolerable, blurred image of what I could have been.
“Hold your horses.” Peter’s hand in mine brought me back. “This just may be the ticket.” Peter placed another letter in my hands.
“What is this?”
“A way to help. You’re invited to address an antiwar rally in downtown Boston. A few weeks from today. They say they want the world-renowned Helen Keller to inspire the crowds, help keep the U.S. out of this damned war.”
“I’ll do it.”
“Not so fast. If you’re so world renowned, why do they want you to speak for free?”
“I’m sure it’s not for free. They must be offering an honorarium?”
I felt a slight vibration as Peter shook the letter and read on: “Twenty dollars! That’s not even horse feed.”
“They don’t need to pay me. They need to raise money to stop the war.”
“At last count, Helen, you have six outbuildings that need roofing, a lawn that’s going to seed, and Annie’s treatment, if she needs it, won’t be free. Now where will you get the money for that?”
“I …”
“By the way,” Peter went on. “Your mother gets here tomorrow. Who paid for her train ticket?”
“Annie and I …”
“And when she gets here, who pays for her food?” Peter fingered the silky dress I wore. “If she’s anything like you and Annie Sullivan—two women who appear to have a severe allergy to anything on sale—who will pay for her trips to Newbury Street for the perfect new shawl?”
“She’s my mother. She needs me.”
“That sounds strangely familiar.” He traced my jaw so softly. “Tell me, Helen, who doesn’t?”
“I’m sorry.” His criticism of me seemed like a small betrayal. Did he think I forgot that I needed money coming in? The cost of Annie’s test and treatment suddenly flooded through me.
“Seems like you’re always apologizing.” He traced my upper lip with his fingers. “But then you go ahead and do whatever you want, anyway.”
I can’t remember a time when Mother didn’t need my help. She needed me to ease her guilt, her sorrow. When I was almost twelve years old, Annie and I traveled to Tuscumbia in June to find my father very low on money—almost bankrupt. Everything he owned was mortgaged. My baby brother, Phillips, had whooping cough, and my half-brother, James, had what seemed to be typhoid fever. Exhausted, Mother cared for them. She had no nurse, no cook. Annie loaned my father thirty-five dollars of her own, and thirty-five of mine, too, so heavily was he in debt.
My father threatened to have me become part of a freak show, to be an exhibit: people would flock to see the blind, deaf, mute girl talk with her hands.
“They’ll pay me five hundred dollars a week,” he yelled. The air in our Tuscumbia house so thick it felt like wool around me, so heavy I could not remove it from my eyes, my mouth. My great-great-grandfather had a claim to thousands of acres of Alabama land, Robert E. Lee was a second cousin to my grandmother; my father was a Confederate Army captain—but after the Civil War his title was about all he had left. Finally, Mother snapped at my father, “You’ll never use her to support us.” But the message was clear: She would fight for me, yes. But the need to make my own life was up to me.
So I told Peter I had to go to Boston Common, I had to be on the podium, in front of the crowd, but I didn’t tell him why. That since an early age I’ve needed a crowd to let me know I have a reason for being. The warmth of their applause slowing, for a moment, the sorrow I, too, carry inside me.
So I turned to him and said, “I have to go. And I’ll need you with me.”
He hesitated.
“Look. I’ll split the twenty-dollar honorarium.”
“You’re too generous,” Peter said.
“It will pay for our train ride—round-trip.”
“And two martinis,” he laughed. “Okay. Boston Common, here we come.” Peter pushed the pile of letters away. “Now, missy, Annie will be back in a few hours and your mother gets here tomorrow, so let’s attend to some more important business right now.”
We had the whole morning together. And I got hungry. A wild growling in my stomach. Together we walked the hall to the kitchen and had toast slathered with jelly, huge glasses of milk, and a bowl of porridge that I made myself.
Then by the kitchen table, the whole kitchen filled with the scent of ripe peaches, he pulled me close to him until I was breathless, and he said, “Can I see the ripe, bawdy Helen?” With one hand he reached behind me to close the kitchen curtains, then slid a date into my mouth; I bit it, then slid it between his teeth.
His mouth tasted like the earth’s deep dark.
Then he lifted up my blouse.
“I’ll put up with your mother. I’ll help you take care of Annie. I’ll even go to the rally with you and take my fee in cold hard cash because it’s my job. But pleasure?” He put his fingers on my blouse, and unbuttoned the top button.
“That’s free.”
Chapter Fourteen
I’ve written twelve books about my blindness, and in them I said I was an optimist, fully alive since the day in college when I’d read Descartes’s “I think, therefore, I am,” and decided I could use my intellect to overcome any obstacles in my way. I wanted for nothing. I was as capable as any sighted or hearing person. Yet I never said how much I yearned for that which
came so easily to others: the ability to love a man, to have a child. Those things would never come freely to me. So a fury raged in me. I became a burnt fuse inside, nothing but ash. I had to learn to act as though parts of myself simply did not exist.
But Peter made those cravings burn again.
So as heat rose inside the kitchen and the windows let in the bitter scent of dried grass, I let Peter reach for me. In the scorching heat of the day he touched me. It was heart-stopping. Peter’s hands held firmly to my waist, and as if we had all the time in the world, I leaned into him again, while the kitchen’s air grew warmer around us. Outside in the early afternoon the mail truck rounded the bend in the road, and was gone, leaving us alone, with no one around for miles.
Peter eased my blouse from my shoulders.
“You need some tutoring.” He led me across the rough kitchen floor to the divan in the front hall.
“And you’re my teacher, I suppose?” I slid back onto the divan. “May I take your advanced class?”
“You’re in. And thank God Annie’s gone till at least five.”
“I won’t thank God she’s sick,” I said. “But the way your hands feel on me are a blessing indeed.”
“Don’t get all serious on me.” He guided my hands under his shirt.
I inhaled sharply as he lowered himself to my ribs.
“Your body is like a temple.” He traced my skin with his mouth.
Suddenly he pulled away. “Damn, she has good timing.”
“Who?”
“Your real teacher.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s here.”
“Are you sure?” I buttoned my blouse, fingers flying. The air grew heavy in the front hallway. Only then, with Peter’s body away from mine, did I sense Annie’s car shuddering into the driveway beyond the maple trees. It seems strange to me even now how calm I felt, as if nothing could go wrong.
“Come on. Her car’s in the driveway. Now up you go, missy.”
I felt a rat-a-tat-tat vibration as Peter opened the shutters over the hall window and then shut them again. “Damn. It’s Annie, all right.” We both willed ourselves to sit apart, to straighten our clothes. There was a pause and then Peter said, “When’s the last time she repaired that car? It’s dinged up on the fender.” Then he stopped. “Oh, that would be—”
