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My mother never wanted me to tell the truth. But at the age of seven when Annie arrived in Tuscumbia my shoelaces were strings, my hair a knotted mass, my voice a bitter rage when anyone tried to rule me. When I wrote these things in my autobiography, my mother said it made her look unfit.
How could I know the dark hallways my mother paced, alone, searching for a way to help me? How at night, unmasked, she felt helpless, terrified, at having to raise me, wondering what would happen to me if she died. How both jealous and proud she felt when Annie civilized me.
The savory smell of pot roast and potatoes from the kitchen told me Annie was hard at work. “Still,” Mother continued, “I’ve never gotten used to you and Annie talking to each other and my not knowing what you’re saying.”
“You mean what Annie just said to me?” I stalled.
She waited.
“We said you never looked better.” How easily I lied.
“And you look quite … robust.” I felt her move back to inspect me. “You’ve been outdoors quite a bit?”
“Swimming, biking.” I bit my lip.
“You’ve taken up exercise.”
“I’ve taken up some new habits, yes.”
“They suit you. You’ve never looked more radiant. But Annie looks pale.”
“Oh, you know, we’re busy.”
“Perhaps Annie has been too busy.” She paused.
“Too busy for what?” I fiddled with my teacup.
“To stay home, to take care of herself.”
“Mother. You know we have to work.” I stopped.
There was a long pause.
“Yes, the Keller trust fund didn’t exactly work out, did it?”
I felt the narrow wedding band on her finger. Mother never spoke of the sweltering Alabama summers when she took Annie and me with her and Father to our retreat house high in the mountains. That house surrounded by pine forests, the tinny scent of red fox, and the dark-cave scent of bear. Annie, Mother, and I sat on the veranda, hungry because there was so little to eat in the house, while my father stalked the woods hunting with his friends. One day he plunked up the veranda steps to pack his bag and return to Tuscumbia, leaving us three in the woods with no money and no way home.
When I wrote about this in one of my books Mother said I brought the family shame.
Now I spoke up and told the truth. I wanted a changed life. I was not afraid. The dining room air shook ever so slightly with Annie’s cough as she rattled the plates in the kitchen.
“All the work’s taken a toll on Annie.”
“Mother, you can’t think that our travels made her sick.”
“I have never been able to tell you what to do.” Mother laughed. “But if Annie had stayed home more …” She was too well bred to mention John’s abandonment of Annie. I felt her turn slightly toward the head of the table where John always sat.
“Mother, that’s over.”
“Well, from what Annie tells me there’s another man in the house.”
I said nothing.
“A single man. Am I right, Helen? Or formally single. Annie tells me he’s engaged.”
“Right.”
“But you’re not.” Mother waited for an answer. “Helen? But you’re not.”
“I’m—”
“You’re a single woman,” Mother went on. “So I trust while Annie’s been ill you have not spent time alone with Mr. Fagan.”
“Mother, he’s my secretary.”
“As long as Annie was with you that’s fine. But from now on I’ll be in the room with you two whenever you do your … letters.”
A headache began to throb behind my temples. To be fair, my mother never imagined the grief she would have after I became deaf and blind before my second birthday. How could she have known what to do? She was the spoiled daughter of a wealthy Memphis family, and when I couldn’t see or hear, some of her relatives demanded that she send me to the Alabama Asylum for the Insane and Infirm. She refused. She found me Annie, fought with my father to send me to school, and for all that I loved her, loved her beyond myself. And for the second time in my life I would bring her unbearable grief.
“I trust you behaved yourself.”
“You have my word.” I withdrew my hand and picked up my teacup, its porcelain so thin.
Chapter Eighteen
Unlike Annie, who was partially blind from the age of seven until she was sixteen, my mother never learned the shape of the earth by touching an orange, as Annie taught me to do, never walked past a factory so filled with heat that she thought, as I did at age seven, that the sun had fallen to the earth; she never felt her way down an alley, fearful of getting lost.
No, blindness was foreign to my mother—for that I am grateful.
But I never said this: I traveled the world, I rallied crowds of thousands outside factories on behalf of workers’ rights in New York, Boston, and Chicago, found my way down streets in Berlin, Paris, and Rome, places where my mother never ventured.
Imagine my pride—and my sorrow: I had vast stretches of loneliness and fear, but still I was freer than my mother, who lived mostly alone.
I had to lie to her about my engagement to Peter. I didn’t have the will to confide in her when I had a new life to live—my own.
Annie came in, and the slight shaking of the table told me she was tapping her shoe against the floor. Mother and I sat side by side, and after Annie passed us platters of pot roast, scented with rosemary, and biscuits, she sat down and handed me a letter.
“Helen, did you write this letter lambasting the French?” Annie spelled to me.
“Where did you find that?” I said.
“In your study. Now did you write it or not?”
“Yes.” I kept my hand in Annie’s. I felt her lean toward Mother to tell her what I’d done. I held my breath, waiting for Mother’s response.
“Perfect, Helen,” Annie spelled to me. “Your mother wants to know if I put you up to this.”
I said nothing.
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sp; “It was that Fagan, Kate,” Annie spelled to Mother, and to me. She then passed a bowl of peas. “I left Helen alone with him for one day and she goes and acts like a traitor.”
“Mr. Fagan put you up to this?” Mother took the bowl from me, her fingers smooth in mine. “When exactly did this happen?”
“Yesterday. When Annie was at the doctor’s. Peter whipped out my response on the typewriter. That’s his job, Mother.” I tried to ease the tension in her touch.
Mother turned from me to face Annie.
“You left Helen alone with this man?”
“He’s not important,” Annie said. “We have more important things to worry about.”
“Helen.” Mother took my arm. “How did this happen? With this Mr. Fagan? Wasn’t Annie supposed to watch you?”
Annie, never one to avoid a fight, sprang up to defend herself. Almost choking on her cough, she said, “Watch Helen? Kate, in case you haven’t noticed, this is the same Helen who punched out my front tooth when she was seven years old. You want me to watch her twenty-four hours a day?”
“Annie, if I’m not mistaken, it is your job to keep Helen away from this—or any—man.”
“How am I to do that,” Annie snapped, “when I may have to move six hundred miles away?”
With a final bang of the door she was gone.
Mother pushed back her chair and rose to her full height. “Bring Mr. Fagan downstairs.”
I rapped three times hard on the floor for Peter, in our signal.
“But first I have one more objection.”
“Yes?” I stood.
“F-a-g-a-n. What kind of name is that?”
“Mother, please.”
“Where is his family from?”
“Ireland. They’re Catholics.”
“Helen, you keep up with the news. Surely you’ve read about the trouble Irish Catholics are causing these days. They don’t hold down jobs. They’ve rioted in New York. Think of your family, Helen. First you defended the Negroes in that letter to the newspaper—”
“That was fifteen years ago.”
“And they still haven’t forgotten about it in Montgomery. Every time your sister, Mildred, has her card club over, someone says you disgraced the Keller family. Now these people.”
