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My brother John, he quit the typewriter factory at sixteen to fight in the war. Sent straight to the trenches and into the French line of fire. But Miss Keller, he didn’t die.
Only woke up in a hospital blind.
Help him.
Sincerely,
Hannah Beutler
Peter pulled away—but I edged closer to him. I felt my long nights of blindness invade the life of this boy, this soldier, and I burst out impulsively that the Germans loved my autobiography, The Story of My Life. What if I give the profits of the German edition to soldiers blinded in the war?
Peter dropped the letter, leaned forward, and put two fingers on my cheek.
“If you give money to blinded Germans, you’ll be marked,” he said. “I told you, Socialists are being arrested left and right for protesting the war.”
“I’m doing it. And when you next come back,” I said, “mark the rest of me.” At that moment I was doubly blind: I didn’t realize how my fame would protect me, but in the months to come Peter would have no such protection.
I took out a Braille pen from my bag sitting on the chair beside me and scrambled through it to find a piece of notepaper to write my letter right away. “What are you doing?” Peter asked. “It’s too dark to write.” Then I felt his hand pause, until I laughed.
“Watch me,” I said. While I pressed the pen to mark the page, Annie walked up to the table and leaned in, tracing her hand over the Braille letters to my publisher, telling them to give money to the German soldiers.
Peter pressed toward me until I felt his approval of me glow like grass. I knew then that I would cling to him. I was not foolish—I was terrified that Annie would sicken and die, that my mother would be the only person left, that I would be sent to live in the cold, dark cell of Alabama.
But I wanted to be loved, and this was my chance. I am yours I wanted to say as Peter traced his thumb in my palm. My two-dimensional world ballooned out: rounder it felt, smoother, larger.
I breathed in fully for the first time.
After we devoured our dessert, Peter led me past the hotel’s grape arbor and into the grassy expanse by the lake’s edge, where, he said, a wooden windmill creaked and groaned. We stood there together, unsure of what to do next until I said, “Annie needs me. I have to go inside.” When Peter led me past the windmill it turned at a full surge as he and I puffed and panted up the hill toward the hotel.
Chapter Four
“Helen, don’t be foolish,” Annie spelled to me moments later when Peter and I reached the hotel’s front porch. She was waiting there for me, and the floorboards gave off that queer midwestern scent of whiskey, prairie dirt, and corn. Annie shook my arm and said again, “Foolish girl. You can’t afford to give money to anybody.” I stood between Annie and Peter, the willows that circled the hotel cooling my arms, and regretted that I’d just told Annie I would donate money from my autobiography to German soldiers blinded by the war.
“We barely have enough for ourselves,” she said, her hand heavy in mine.
“You’re tired,” I spelled, my fingers erratic in her palm. “Are you all right?”
“Don’t change the subject.”
But I interrupted again. “Where’s Peter?” I turned toward the street, where the rumble of cars shook the porch. “Has he left?” Annie’s palm tightened under my fingertips, telling me her temper was about to flare. From the first day that Peter and I met—even though she hired him to help—his very existence rattled her. It was partly that I might be taken in, but it was more that she might be replaced.
“Hold on,” she said. Her footsteps receded to the end of the porch, then I felt the sluicing of the porch swing. The swing, Annie showed me that morning, hung from the wooden ceiling from two metal hooks. The clink of the swing’s metal chains against them now grated the night air and suddenly mixed with the scent of sulfur and cigarette smoke.
I tilted my head toward the swing. Peter was in it, surely, slouched into the swing’s cotton cushions, his fingers on the cigarette as he inhaled the smoke.
“Now,” Annie said when she came back across the porch and took my arm. She led me inside the hotel’s heavy front door. “He’s far enough away so we can talk.” She sped me across the lobby, and as we rounded the corner by the coffee shop I stiffened. Through an open window Peter’s scent of smoke drifted toward me as we passed. I wanted to stop there, but Annie hurried me toward her room, all the while talking as we walked rapidly down the hall: “If you give money to Germans—Germans, Helen, even blind ones—the press will have a field day. I can see the headlines now: ‘Helen Keller, Traitor.’ Then who will come to hear our talks? We get paid to do them, remember? We get paid by the number of tickets collected at the door. Helen, come on. We barely have enough money to make it back to Massachusetts at this rate. If you give money to Germans, believe me, it will be much worse.”
I turned to move farther down the hall to my own room, but Annie squeezed my hand harder. “What’s going on?” she demanded, leaning against the doorjamb of her room. “What gave you this idea?” When I said, “Peter,” she leaned forward. “Why did you talk about this with him first, and not me?” Her voice under my fingertips slightly oily, the color of dark.
I felt the whoosh of air as she pushed open the door to her room. The scent of the coffee cup she’d left on her bureau mixed with the tang of her leather suitcase just inside the door. “Watch your step.” I knew Annie was sloppy and she warned me about her clothes on the slippery bare floor, and with her hand looped in mine, she kicked the clothes aside, led me in, and rapidly closed the door. “Stay here.” She crossed the room to the small desk sitting by the far window, came back, and said, “Look at this. I’ll show you how crazy your idea is.”
She had scooped up a loose sheaf of papers from her desk and now handed them to me. “Helen, listen.” She read them quickly. The top letter said, “American Investment Warning: Stocks at a Loss, Balance Zero.”
Then Annie said, “Listen up, Helen. If people stay away from our talks and our stocks keep falling …” She paused. “We won’t be able to keep our house more than another few months.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll fix it,” I said.
But Annie pulled my hand as if to shake me. “Face facts, Helen. Your father stopped paying me my salary twenty years ago, when you were ten years old. He was supposed to pay me until you were eighteen, but you know his will made no provisions for my salary. And you didn’t get your share after he died, even though your sister and brothers did. We’ve paid our own way since you were twenty-three, by God knows how many lectures, your books, that yearly money from Carnegie and Sterling. But it’s different now. I have this damned cough day and night. You may have the strength to cross the country still, six months of the year. But Helen, I just don’t.”
At that moment her cough seemed like a retreat. Some place safe where she could stop living our life, ignore our troubles, and just be alone. From the open window by her bed came a breeze so cold it tightened my chest, but I kept Annie’s hand in my own.
“Keep this in mind. Peter will cost us plenty. But we need him here if I’m too sick to work.”
At the mention of Peter’s name I wanted to run from Annie’s side, just to
be near him.
But Annie’s scent of defeat called me back.
She led me across the room to the bed by the windows and sat down.
I turned toward her. “Stay with me,” Annie told me. “It’ll be all right. It’s probably just a scare.” But I pulled my hand away and moved to the window facing the porch. Its glass cool under my fingertips. The glass trembled with the vibrations of a train hurtling across the countryside just past the hotel. I imagined I was on the train with Peter, moving into the night with him. Instead I walked back to the bed where Annie sat and took her hand. She needed me so much. Was it wrong for me to want Peter—any man, really—to help me find a life apart?
The train in the distant woods left a taste like iron in my mouth.
One thing I never said was how tired I was at times. What people respected most about me was my stamina. Especially that summer of 1916 when we fell into debt. Annie and I never liked paying bills, never liked to feel their envelopes, and now that our lecture tour was a failure because I kept talking against the war, we needed our investment returns; without them we couldn’t pay the maintenance on our house that August, or for the rest of that fall. Still, we never missed the chance to buy a new fur on Newbury Street instead of paying the water bill or the mortgage.
Why didn’t we have enough money? Andrew Carnegie gave me a pension every year. The Sugar King of Boston, John Spaulding, gave me stocks to protect my welfare. Even Mark Twain, whom I met on a warm Sunday in New York, at a lunch in the home of Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence Hutton when I was fourteen, got his friend the “robber baron” Henry Rodgers, of Standard Oil, to help pay for my college education. I had no debt from those years.
But as I sat in the upholstered chair next to Annie’s bed, I knew the truth was that Annie was dependent on me for a living, and all the money we made from lecturing, from my books, went to protect her and pay for my secretaries. Annie and I both needed food, clothes, a new roof on our house, and all the people we required to keep me looking “normal” in other people’s eyes.
