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“Is it Peter?” I felt for Annie’s hand.
“It’s a letter.”
“Your tests? You have the results?” The floor felt chilly under my feet.
Annie brushed my hair back and urged me up from the chair.
“Annie, tell me. Are you very sick?”
“For God’s sake, Helen. I’ve been sick all my life.” She shook my arm. “I don’t know anything yet about the TB. Those slowpokes are keeping me on tenterhooks. They’ll tell me at the last minute, after I’ve not slept for two weeks.”
“They’ll tell you you’re fine,” I said.
“They’ll tell me I’m doomed.” She tapped her foot, waiting for me to get up.
Here’s what I imagine when I stand by Annie in her room, terrified that she might die: I am seven years old. Annie has not yet come into my life. I pat the damp ground of Tuscumbia, Alabama, next to our cook’s daughter, Martha Washington. Her skin dusky-dark, Martha grunts beside me, making a house of twigs and sticks with pasty mud. When I wham her leg she moves the way I want her to. She was my only friend until Annie arrived.
In the first month after Annie’s arrival I pouted and stormed when she tried to make me eat from a plate; within two months I no longer stayed in the big house with my mother. I no longer needed to be violent with Martha Washington.
No. I spelled w-a-t-e-r under the backyard pump, and Annie took me to live in the tiny house, the cabin next door, just Annie and me. It seemed, during those days and nights alone, the darkness was mushroomy, basil-scented in my child-mouth. When we left that house after several weeks to again live with my family, Annie and I were wrapped in a secret girl pact. I would be hers; she would be mine.
She would be my raft out of darkness.
So I felt Annie’s face. “Is it your eyes? You’ve gotten a letter from your eye doctor?”
“How could I be your constant companion if I couldn’t see perfectly? Between us we need at least two good eyes.”
What Annie said was ironic, because growing up, the world for her had always been a blue-black place, its people and objects in a haze. When she was very small a burning started in her eyes. When she rubbed them and cried out, her mother bathed them in geranium water because they couldn’t afford a doctor. By age seven Annie was legally blind, groping her way from place to place.
She saw the world as matted, moving swirls of colors and gray. From the age of ten to fourteen she lived in the disreputable Tewksbury poorhouse. When a man from the welfare department came to inspect the poorhouse, Annie threw herself at him, saying, “I want to go to school.” He arranged for her to go to Perkins, where she learned to read and write completely at the age of fourteen; she graduated when she was twenty. During those years she had five operations at the charity hospital, and by her late teens she saw well enough to pass for sighted. Annie craved normality, and if she lost her sight again she’d lose everything, including me.
“I can see perfectly,” Annie said. She nudged me to get up from my chair.
I exhaled.
“I can even see a liar a mile away.”
I squirmed in my chair.
“Come on. I’ll prove it to you.” She led me through the hall.
“Where are we going?”
“Your study. I’ve been looking through some letters.”
“You were spying on me?”
“Not spying. Investigating. And it’s Peter I’m after.”
“Shouldn’t we respect his privacy?”
“Respect this.” Annie plunked me into a mohair chair by my desk and rattled a letter in front of me. “It’s addressed to Peter. Get ready, Helen.”
“Ready for what?”
“To bid him good-bye.”
“Don’t …” Whatever the letter said, I didn’t want to know. But Annie spelled rapidly into my hand:
Miss Dorothy Eagan, 17 Eagleview Point, Albany, New York
Peter Mine,
I crave your scent on my hands. I crave your letters, asking what I’m wearing. I’ll tell you. I am wearing only desire for you.
I need to see you. I’m coming to Boston next week. Can you meet me at the two o’clock train? Please wear your blue suit. You always look so handsome in blue.
Yours deeply,
Dorothy
Annie and I sat together, her hand firm but nervous in mine.
“So he really loves someone else,” Annie spelled.
Fire, a roiling thing in me.
“Your time with him is almost over.”
“It’s not.” Deception comes to everyone sometimes. If I could deceive Annie and my own mother, there must be a reason why Peter would deceive me about another woman.
“What’s the date on the letter?”
“Helen, I’m sorry. He’s a charlatan. All men are. You have to face facts.”
“Tell me the date. It may have been written before he met me.”
“What?”
“He can’t be involved with her. He’s—”
“You should have believed me when I told you what John reported about him.”
“Oh, Annie. You know John’s a liar.”
“True.” Annie pulled back, and I felt her hands cool as she held mine, her whole self assessing me. “He was, is, a liar. But this letter, Helen, is incontrovertible proof.”
“It proves nothing.”
Annie smoothed my hair.
“Helen,” Annie spelled softly. “He’s an opportunist. I asked him to clean out some of your old correspondence files last week; he pulled out a stack of letters from Mark Twain and said, ‘Did they correspond a lot?’ I told him Twain had loved you like a daughter until the day he died. Helen, remember having tea with him in New York? He even left whiskey for you in your room when we visited him at his Connecticut house, saying everyone needed a friend in the night.”
“Yes.” Something was wrong. But I didn’t want Annie, or even myself, to know what it was. I nudged the bedroom floorboard with my shoe.
“So the look in Peter’s eyes when he heard how close you were to Twain, well, I could just see him imagining himself flitting around with all the other people you know. Mark my words. He wants so much to be famous he’ll stick to you like glue.” She snapped her fingers so hard I felt the snap deep in my hand.
“You don’t know that.”
“Helen. If you could have seen him, you’d agree.”
I felt a bit of fear. Could I really know Peter without seeing? A blind man once said he didn’t want sight. He wanted longer arms. Arms so long that if he wanted to understand the moon, he would simply reach up and touch it: he would rather feel the moon than see it. So no, I didn’t need to see Peter: the hot skin of his neck, his mouth on mine, said all I needed to know.
“People aren’t always what they seem,” I said.
“Want to bet?” Annie spelled back, her hand still holding Dorothy Eagan’s letter. I steadied myself in my chair.
“At least you’ll be rid of him,” Annie said a few minutes later. I sat so still in the chai
r. The air near her bed seemed dense. “Read me the date on the letter,” I said. “A date will tell me if it is recent or not.” Annie did not move.
Another thing no one tells you about being blind is the utter dependency, the way I have to cajole, plead, persuade those around me to do the simplest things, like read me the date because I can’t do it myself. If Annie refuses, how can I know if Peter’s been deceiving me? It’s hard to believe how many of my desires I’ve had to bury, because they didn’t fit the whim of someone else. But it’s like I’ve caught a fever. I want to run away with Peter, and my hands shake uncontrollably.
“The date,” I repeated.
“It’s too light to see.”
“Your vision is not the best,” I tried to joke.
Annie coughed. “So true.”
“It could be an old letter.”
“And I could be President Wilson,” Annie said.
My deepest regret? How easily I would have excused him for anything. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: there are so many, many ways to be blind.
Chapter Twenty-three
America’s First Lady of Courage. That’s how I am known, for my relentless fight for the deaf and blind. It’s true that I’ve crisscrossed the country tirelessly, that I’ve raised more money than anyone else, that I demand the same rights as anyone in the hearing and sighted world. But I can’t claim to be the First Lady of Courage. It took all the courage I had to walk away from Annie and find my way down the hall, alone.
So I don’t remember the vibration of Peter’s footsteps, but he followed me into my study. I sat at my desk, my hands tracing the letter Annie showed me. Panic filled me, but I was determined to show Peter that I was strong. I won’t let anyone take my dignity, especially him. I hid the letter behind my back.
“What do you have there?” He laughed, pulling my hand toward him.
