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“Nothing.” I kept my hand in a fist.
“Good. Fight me. I love a good tussle.” He leaned me against the wall by the bookshelves.
“Stop it.” I pushed him away.
“Yes, tell me to stop.” He put his mouth to my neck. “Say, ‘Peter, stop,’ and I’ll say—”
“You’ll say you’re sorry.”
“Sorry?” He lifted his head. “The only thing I’m sorry about is this damned corset of yours,” he laughed, trying to loosen the waist of my skirt.
“You have plenty to be sorry for. Deceiving me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Read it to me.” I handed him the letter. “I want to hear it from you.”
“Oh.” Peter paused. His hands shook.
“Yes?”
“Oh.” Peter laughed. “Did Annie show this to you?”
“Of course she did. She, at least, wants to protect me.”
“She wants to keep you in a gilded cage, is what she wants.”
“Who is she? This Miss Dorothy Eagan?”
“She’s not important now.”
“But she must have been. Tell me.”
“The truth? She’s nothing like you. I met her at a charity ball, her father knew mine.”
“And you loved her?”
“No, Helen. I thought I did.”
“But you made love to her?”
“Helen, please let’s not talk about the past.”
I didn’t speak for a long time. “Leave me alone. I need time to think,” I said. Smoke from Peter’s cigarette filled the air as he left the room. I can tell you that I sat at my desk and pulled open the drawer. I took out my cloth journal written when I was seven years old. In it I had recorded:
Tuscumbia, Alabama
Annie’s gone away.
She left me with Mother.
My doll won’t stop crying.
I hit her with a stick.
How painful it is for me to lose someone. But I never told Annie I missed her. Too painful it was, to let in desire. So Peter had loved someone before he met me. So what? I tried to push the doubts away.
“Helen.” Peter came in and took my hand. “That’s over. This is now. And we have a date with destiny.”
“A date with what?”
“The day we go to Boston City Hall, dummy. To get a marriage license.”
“Don’t call me dummy.” I almost laughed. “I’m a bit sensitive about that.”
“Helen.” He pulled me close. “For a woman who can’t speak, you sure have an awful lot to say.”
I’m ashamed that I didn’t ask the questions that rose in my mind then. I regret that I did not say, “Did you want to marry her?” Why didn’t I ask? Not because I was afraid that other women would fall for Peter because he was so handsome, funny, and smart. No, I was afraid that if he could leave one woman so suddenly, why couldn’t he leave me?
Peter stood beside me, his whole body shaking a bit, radiating a kind of queer heat. I rubbed his shirt cuff, the fabric so worn. “Peter, I’m not saying you don’t care for me …”
“Care for you? You’re a miracle to me.”
“A miracle, yes.”
“Someone who showed me a life I had never thought of before.”
“Yes.”
“Someone who showed me I could live in a way I didn’t think possible.”
“Yes.”
“Helen. I should have told you. But—”
“You don’t have to explain.”
He kissed me and took away my breath.
“Helen, pack your bags tonight. The rally in Boston is in three days. We have to be ready.” He traced along my neck with his thumb. “Annie and your mother will be expecting me to pick you up after breakfast. We’ll drive to the train station and take the eight forty-five to Boston.”
“What about the marriage license?”
“Right after the rally, my pet. Try to get some rest tonight.”
“I won’t be able to.”
“Well, you’d better, because you’ll need your beauty sleep.” He slid his thumb into the opening of my blouse.
I know Annie is not a saint. Nor is Peter. Nor am I. I need them. Without Annie or Peter I don’t have a home to call my own. But I know this: with Peter engulfing me I feel so strong I can suddenly see the sky.
Chapter Twenty-four
I once wrote that my blindness never made me sad. But I was not telling the whole truth. After Peter left that night I felt sadness pitch and fall through me. If Annie hadn’t shown me that letter, Peter wouldn’t have told me about Dorothy. What else was he hiding? I was so dependent on others, so vulnerable, that I was more aware of my blindness than ever.
Still, I craved Peter. I didn’t care who I hurt, or what I refused to see. I only wanted him, so I didn’t say a word when he found me in the backyard the next day.
“Where’s Annie? Your mother?” Peter turned around as if inspecting the yard. “Lurking in the shrubs to spy on us?”
“They’re in Boston. John’s baby is due any day now, and Annie will be damned—her words, not mine—if he and Myla bring that baby back to the apartment Annie and John used to share. She won’t allow them to use what’s hers, so Annie’s there right now dragging out her maple bureau, taking away her kitchen chairs. She’s even pulling the telephone out of the wall.”
“She’s a force of nature.” Peter laughed. “She’ll probably scour the linoleum off the floor.”
“With her bare hands.”
“Hell hath no wrath.” Peter took my hand. “By the way, I wrote to Dorothy. It’s off now.”
“For good?”
“Forever.”
I inhaled the chill air and pulled my jacket around me.
Peter tapped out a cigarette. “One more thing,” he said. “This apartment of John’s. Do you and Annie still pay the rent?”
I didn’t answer.
“Helen? You can’t pay for your own house.”
“Annie won’t let John have her books, pots, and pans. She’s even taking the pillows off the couches.”
“That’ll show him.”
“Peter.”
“Yup. Annie’s really taking a stand. Her husband has a child, and she still—”
“Loves him.”
“She’s too loyal.”
“People are, sometimes.”
Peter’s deception was still on my mind. My image of him as a courageous, honest man had started to fray. But I was determined to seal off that knowledge. Of all people, I knew how one must hide parts of oneself to succeed in the world.
Peter’s coat gave off the woody scent of the neighbor’s fire, where they burned their fall leaves. He fiddled with the buttons on my jacket. I wanted him to kiss me, to slip his hand inside my jacket, but I held back.
“Hey,” Peter said. “Those two gals are out of town and we’re alone.”
“No. Ian, the boy who mows the lawn, he’s out in the garden shed, fixing the mower. Mother and Annie would never leave me here alone.”
“Then let’s make a run for it.”
“A run for what?”
“That meadow behind the house. No one will see us there.” He tugged at my sleeve. “Hurry, Helen. And once you’re warmed up you’ll need to loosen those tight clothes.”
“Yes, sir.” I let him lead me under a thicket of trees.
“Come on, lazybones.” Peter led me into the meadow. Pine needles crunched under my shoes, and the cool scent of mint rose from the garden beyond the pines. Under a tree, Peter slowly pulled at the silk bow of my blouse.
“Too bad this knot is so tight. I’m afraid I’ll have to use my teeth.”
“What a shame.”
“I might have to tear it.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” I raised my neck to him. “Let me help.”
“Ah, good girl,” he said. “I love a woman who takes the lead.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. But I also like a woman who submits.
Like this.” He clasped my wrists behind my back, and I couldn’t move my hands.
He held them high above my head, and I remembered when I was a small child and had just learned language—hundreds of new words a day—and constantly “talked” to myself by spelling words into my own hands. Annie, upset that I’d seem blind to others, told me to stop. For her lesson I would pay a heavy price.
“Hey.” Peter dropped my hands. “What’s this?”
I felt the ground with the toe of my shoe. “Croquet hoop.”
“All these years you’ve been out in this meadow playing what? Croquet?”
