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“I wouldn’t go that far.”
I waited, the driveway cold beneath my shoes.
“Peter, what does your name mean?”
“The rock.”
“You’re steady.”
“Yup. And I roll over whatever is in my way.”
Nine months, maybe less. I may hold a baby in my arms. I’ll spread, grow larger, fast. I’ll need new clothes, I’ll need to tell Peter that I have no idea how to be a mother, how to care for a daughter or a son. Poor child. All her—or his—life, the center of attention, simply because of me. People will say the child is the next miracle. And Peter and I? Even more delirious with—what? This lightning strike of joy.
Peter opened the trash can, and I felt a whoosh of air as he dropped the book into it. He guided me into a kitchen chair, rattling the table when he sat in the rickety one next to mine, and then pulled my foot into his lap, untied my shoe, and massaged my heel.
“What are you doing?” I pulled my foot away, but he grabbed my arch and held it.
“Checking to see if you have cold feet.”
“Very funny. And what about you? No nerves?”
“Why should I worry? Okay, you won’t go with me today, but Annie leaves tonight; I’ve booked train reservations for us both tomorrow morning; a quick ceremony at Boston City Hall and boom—you’re Mrs. Peter Fagan. Once we’ve tied the knot, I’m your legal mate, and no one, not even your dear, lovely mother, will be able to separate us.”
“You think of everything. Almost.”
“What do you mean, ‘almost’?”
“Shall we send out wedding invitations?”
“It’s a bit late for that.”
“Annie postponed her wedding to John so many times he threatened to write ‘Subject to change without notice’ at the bottom of their invitations.”
“Too bad she went through with it.”
“Too bad he left.”
“She didn’t see what was coming.” We moved Annie’s trunk to the front hall and sat down. A great sadness filled me, and I don’t know why I said this, but I did. “No matter how it turned out, she doesn’t have any regrets.”
“Helen, that’s not true. Annie’s never gotten over John leaving.”
“Fine. But you said yesterday to always stick to your story, and that’s mine. She loved her husband, she tried, and it—”
“Crashed and burned.” Peter stacked the small suitcase atop the trunk.
“She had no regrets,” I said.
When Peter turned to the hall telephone to order Annie’s cab, I stood alone on the rug, my fingers moving as if repeating my words. But when Peter hung up, recrossed the hall, and took my hands, he held them so tight, I couldn’t say a thing.
Chapter Thirty-three
Books are the eyes of the blind, I wrote in one of my publications. But nothing I ever read gave me instructions, a manual, on how a woman like me breaks away from her family to start a new life. I had only my desperation to get away, my craving for Peter, my foolish belief that I could have everything normal women had.
Peter released my hands. “Annie’s asleep, your mother’s napping, too. Helen, I want to be alone with you one more time before we marry. Come to my place this afternoon. We’ll have an hour alone, maybe two. We’ll be back for dinner …”
“No.” I backed away. “I’m too nervous.”
“Come on. We can practice our lines in the car. I’ll say, ‘I, Peter Fagan, do take thee, Helen Adams Keller …’”
“I know my lines. Let’s practice something else.” I leaned over and kissed him.
“Ah, a girl after my own heart.” He led me across the kitchen, out the back door, and down the steps. I couldn’t wait for him to open the car door and start the engine; I couldn’t wait to be alone with him, as if it were the first time.
At Peter’s house something inside me tipped and spun. The cool scent of fresh water filled the air when we walked in the front door. “Oh, perfect.” Peter dropped my hand. “Just what I need. Instead of seducing you, it looks like I’ll be repairing a broken water pipe instead.” Peter plopped me into a chair by the front window. “Water’s spurting from the damned pipe, all over the floor.” In moments I felt a chut-chut-chut as Peter dragged a wooden ladder across the floor. “Damned cheap house. Flimsy construction. There’s a leak in the back hallway, and no one to fix it. This place was probably a slave shack before Annie rented it for me.”
“We citizens of Massachusetts never owned slaves.”
“You sure did. Whole packs of them in the 1600s and 1700s.”
“Well, I personally never owned slaves.”
“Come on, Miss Born-in-Alabama. The Keller family churned out Southern cotton for centuries. They must have had the help of slaves. Or do I have my history wrong?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. He just propped the ladder against the wall and climbed the teetery rungs. I held the ladder in place with all my strength.
I don’t see black, white, or even gray, but I’ve known from a young age that nothing is simple, or clear-cut. Everything has its price. “Did the Keller family own slaves?” Annie asked my father when I was eight. Every night in the Tuscumbia dining room Annie threw herself into a pitched battle with my father about the Civil War. “Yankee horse thief,” my father ranted at Annie, refusing to answer. “Coming down here and criticizing our way of life. Why don’t you go back where you came from?” He shook his fist at her.
“Fine,” Annie said. “I can’t wait to be back where people are treated with dignity.”
“Dignity?” my father said, as Annie quickly spelled his words into my palm. “You’re telling me the North treats its people better than the South does? Listen to me, Miss Sullivan. It is Miss, isn’t it?”
“You know it is,” Annie snapped back.
“Well, Miss Sullivan, we may have owned slaves, but we didn’t send our white girls, our white women, out to work.” He said this last word as if it hurt.
I sat by Annie, quivering.
“You think work is a dirty word?” Annie said. “Look around at all your finery. Maybe you didn’t work for this, but back in your father’s generation some slaves on the Keller plantation certainly did. Why don’t you acknowledge that all you have came from the backs of slave labor? Slaves made your life of leisure possible. Yes, Captain Keller, I work. I don’t depend on the labor of others to support me.”
My father waited a long time to answer. Then he said, “Why, Miss Sullivan, we lost our money after the Civil War. But the little that’s left, yes, some of it came from the old slave-owning days of the South. And that’s what makes your paycheck so fat.”
Annie said nothing.
“So tell me, Miss Sullivan. Do you still think you’re so almighty free?”
I remember Annie shaking with rage in the dining room. Part of her salary, or at least the home she lived in with me, came from a past of which she wanted no pa
rt. But since that day, I’ve understood that nothing is black or white.
I was still holding the ladder. “Peter, we have only an hour together here. Why don’t you come down? Call a plumber, that’s what Annie and I do when there’s a leak.”
“Numbers. I want numbers,” Peter climbed down and took my hand. “How many times in the past year, when you and Annie didn’t have two nickels to rub together, did you call some poor soul to fix something in that rattletrap house?”
“I don’t know. Five, maybe ten times.”
“And how many times did they get paid?”
“Peter.”
“Don’t ‘Peter’ me.” He pushed the ladder away and held my hands. “You know as well as I do that Annie either charmed them into doing the job for free or tossed their bills in the trash when they left. Am I right?”
“Peter, you know the answer. But I’m glad she did. Have you seen the bill for Annie’s trip to Puerto Rico? She refused to go to that sanatorium in New York. She’s rented a cottage outside San Juan, where she says she can rest. So she’ll need to pay for the ship, a car, a room, and food for three to six months.”
“One thing about being blind, no one ever tells you the cost.”
“On the contrary. I know the cost of everything.” Maybe that’s why the idea of having a child frightened me less than it did Peter. I had my principles, but blind and deaf, totally dependent on others for my life, my sustenance, I knew that nothing came without a price. And I was willing to pay it. If I had to take more money from Carnegie to support myself and this child, well, I would swallow hard and do it.
Peter led me toward his bedroom. “Helen, you’re one of the lucky few who make money, and even luckier still because you’re about to marry a great guy like me.” He shut the door to his room and pulled me to him. “But, Helen, tell me. Just how many deaf-blind women have kids?”
