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“It was nothing. A poke in the arm and I was done. A whole day wasted.”
“Today wasn’t wasted …”
“You’re right, Helen. Today wasn’t wasted. I left the house at six a.m. with my chest feeling like it was on fire, and I came home five hours later with my ears about to burst: your mother talked nonstop from the time I picked her up at South Station until the minute we came up the driveway, and where were you? Were you here to listen to her torrent of words about Mildred, and the new baby Katherine—”
“Is Mother okay?”
“And Mildred’s most excellent mincemeat pies, how Mildred is the best housekeeper in Montgomery, and the Junior League just can’t function without her. I swear, Helen, you know I love her, but then we come in here, practically kicking our way through the books and parcels scattered in the front hall, there’s no food for dinner, I have to turn around and go back out to grocery shop and you—the reason she came here—you are nowhere to be found.”
Too delirious to answer, I just laughed.
“It’s not funny.” Annie whacked me with a rolled-up newspaper. “You couldn’t have cleaned up?”
“I should have, you’re right.” I smiled—it was so absurd.
“So? Where were you?”
“Oh, out walking.” I smoothed my dress, one button still open.
“It’s pouring, Helen.” I felt Annie step away from me, examining me from head to foot. She patted my dress.
“You’re soaking wet.” She came closer and sniffed my collar, my neck, my hair. “And you reek of cigarette smoke.”
I was determined to keep my secret about Peter to myself. I couldn’t give Annie the chance to stop me, to end this happiness.
A great silence fell over the room.
“Peter loves his vices, doesn’t he? Have you become the newest of them?”
I wanted to say, “I am engaged. I am to be married—Peter and I, we’re going to run away.” But again I lied.
“I was in the barn.”
“In the barn?”
“Ian, the boy who cuts the lawn, he was smoking out there.”
“And you? What were you doing? Reading those trashy romance novels you hide in that rusted metal bin?”
“Guilty.” I smiled. “What’s my punishment?”
Annie laughed and poked me on the arm. Then she unpacked the rest of the groceries while I followed her around the kitchen as if nothing at all had happened.
The blanketed air in the room told me Annie was still angry, so I pulled her toward the kitchen table and spelled, “You’re tired. Please, sit down. Read, have some tea, relax.” I gave her the newspaper. To my relief she took it and settled into a chair beside me.
“Oh, this is classic,” Annie said moments later. “Another big shot idealizing the blind.”
“What?” A car rushed by outside. I felt it through the floor as I held her hand.
“Here, in the paper.” She shook out the newspaper, its wet scent rising to me. “They’re quoting this Indian swami. A temple in his name is being built in Boston. According to this article, a blind person asked the swami if there’s anything worse than losing one’s eyesight. The swami replied: ‘Yes, losing your vision!’”
“Who said that?”
“Swami Vivekananda. Born in India in 1863, died in 1902, believed we are all one. Traveled the world saying so. He’s one of your type: he’s met with everyone—Harvard professors, the common man, heads of universities from here to Kingdom Come.”
“Well, he’s right. Peter has a vision,” I spelled to Annie. “He thinks everyone—even people left out of the system—should take their place in the world.”
“Peter sees what he wants to see.” Annie’s hand turned harder in mine. “Helen, have you even noticed that we’re using only half the kitchen table this morning? Do you have any idea why? It’s because your Mr. Vision, as you call him, is too busy idling about to help keep this house going—and don’t tell me he’s too good for that work. We all pitch in here. Here, feel this.” She laid my hand on a stack of books that were spread out over the table’s entire right side. “Recognize these?”
“My Braille books,” I said.
“Right. I asked Peter to take them down and clear out the bookcase. It’s dusty, and we always clean it this time of year. So what did he do? He pulled down all your books—and you know together they weigh tons—and left them piled here for two days. He’s too busy dreaming up schemes to improve conditions for the women of the Lawrence Mills than to help the ones right here in this home.”
“You could have asked me.”
“When you do housework it’s like a tornado has gone through the room. And Peter doesn’t have a practical bone in his body,” Annie spelled, her fingers staccato in mine. “You need someone to buy sugar and milk every week, to set up your next speaking engagements, to get you there and back, and to make sure there’s food to eat when you get home again. Not to mention holding reporters at bay, and tracking the finances to keep this whole ship steady.”
At that moment, I was so elated about Peter wanting to marry me that I refused to see anything else. I didn’t think about how we’d secretly marry or, once married, how we would work out the details of our life together. All I could do was run my hands over my Braille books, sure that we would find a solution.
“Peter possibly may have a vision.” Annie shoved the books to the corner, and the floor vibrated beneath my feet as she dragged a stepladder to the bookshelf. A shudder told me she climbed up, re-positioned the heavy volumes, and came back down. “But God knows both of you can’t be blind.”
Annie was not finished, not by a long shot. She was strangely attracted to what she suspected was happening between me and Peter. Even as I got up and walked to the dining room to set the table for dinner, feeling my way around it, one hand on the edge as a guide, the other placing napkins to the left of three plates—for Annie, Mother, and myself—Annie followed me, eager to talk. With a strange unease to her fingers she tapped, “I asked around about your Mr. Fagan today.”
“What?” I stopped and fiddled with the edge of a plate.
“In Boston. I stopped by the Herald—”
“Was John there?”
“Yes, well, no. Not for long, but I—”
“You saw him? Annie?”
“I …” Annie held up her hands. I imagined tuberculosis floating like bits of ash in her lungs. She was afraid. She wanted John back. But by the limp feeling in her hand I knew he had no intention of coming to Wrentham again. “Mr. Fagan’s a new hire, not much experience. Helen, are you listening?”
“Yes.” I’d finished setting the table and collapsed on a chair by the fireplace, unsure what Annie would say next.
“He’s engaged.”
“Oh, he’s engaged, all right.”
“He’s engaged to a Miss Dorothy Eagan.”
“No, he’s not.”
“I have John’s word on this.”
“That couldn’t be true.”
“At least I know this: he’ll stay away from you.”
I knew John would say anything to hurt Annie and me. I never doubted that he had lied about Peter. But how fine, how really liberating, that Annie now thought she didn’t have to worry. As we waited for my mother to come to dinner I thought I was almost free.
Chapter Seventeen
Some people smell of fire. My mother swept into the dining room and the afternoon stood still. I inhaled her and remembered when I was four: the smell of floor wax, lard from the huge iron pots hanging over the kitchen fireplace, and the churned butter as my mother worked alongside the Negro servants, all the while me clinging to her skirts.
“You two need a little time alone,” Annie spelled into my palm. “I’m going to put dinner on.” Then she spelled only to me, “For God’s sake, Helen. Behave yourself while I’m gone.”
She started to cough, that ratcheting mixing with the vibration of her shoes as she left the room.
Moth
er never liked talking about difficulties. Even with the scent of Annie’s menthol cough drops permeating the room, Mother didn’t mention tuberculosis, or the fact that if Annie died, the only person left to take care of me would be Mother herself. So, as the curtains billowed, filling the room with hot, damp air, Mother moved her fingers in mine as if counting. Her hand was not rough and sinewy, like Peter’s, nor increasingly wan, like Annie’s, but softer, more yielding, scented of the ferns, yellow roses, and ivy that surrounded her Alabama house.
Still, her wedding ring parted my right thumb from my fingers, as if she specialized in taking things apart.
“How long has it been, Helen?”
“How long has what been? Annie’s test? Two, three days.”
“No. How many years has it been since Annie came to us?”
“I was seven, so thirty years.”
“And she’s still as … tempestuous as ever?”
“You mean moody? Yes.”
“That’s amazing.”
“What?”
“Not that she came—she needed work; we needed a teacher. It’s only amazing that she stayed.”
I was so anxious to keep Mother’s mind off of Peter and me that I brought up one of her favorite stories.
“You said Annie looked like a ragamuffin when she got off the Boston-Tuscumbia train. The cinders had made her eyes swell, and she lost a shoe in Baltimore so she came limping off the train, one eye squinted shut, and you thought, ‘This is the teacher Perkins sent us? This is the valedictorian of the 1886 graduating class?’”
“That whole first year she fought every night with your father over dinner about how the Yankees won the Civil War, and she was so furious at your father’s insistence that the South deserved to win that I can’t tell you how many times she packed her bags to leave.” Mother laughed.
“And I was terrorizing the dining room.”
“Helen. You were never that bad.”
“You’re right. I was worse.”
