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Peter was gone.
Chapter Forty
Days passed. Rain battered the house. Thanksgiving was ushered in with all of us seated at Mildred’s oval dining table, Warren passing platters of food that no one ate; Mother on my left, refusing to speak, Mildred on my right, urging me to eat something—“Even a bit of turkey. Just one bite, please, Helen.” I pushed the plate away, my own feelings dulled, emptiness filling the place where Peter’s love had been. As dinner went on, a curious darkness roamed the dining room, slid over the damask tablecloth, hovered over the heavy silver as we passed the food, then moved beneath my skin, pushing up through my muscles, circulating in my blood.
Then came a knock on the front door. With a scrape of his chair Warren stood, walked heavily to answer it, then returned to the table.
“For you.” He put a bouquet of gardenias in my hands.
“Let me.” Mildred read the card, “To Helen Keller, whose courage inspires us all. Best wishes on Thanksgiving from the Montgomery Ladies Auxiliary.”
Had I dared hope the flowers were from Peter?
By evening I ached to leave. Warren had not returned from hunting, Mildred fed Katherine in the kitchen, and Mother sat by the living-room fire with her back to me. I sat alone in my scratchy chair across from her. I wanted to write to Annie, Please, help me. But a dull ache in my heart told me it was futile. Peter was gone for good. The price of my deaf-blindness weighed heavily on me. If Annie didn’t get well, and Peter was gone, what would become of me?
Mother broke her silence. “Your house is ready.”
“What house?”
“The one in Forest Hills. The one I rented for you. I’ll stay there with you as well.”
I said nothing.
“The farmhouse is sold. Your lawyer signed the papers since you’ve been … ill.”
“Please, Mother …” I took her hand. “I wasn’t ill, I was—”
“This would be a good time to do as I ask. If anyone questions—and believe me, we’ll do all we can to make sure very few people find out—but if anyone insists, Helen, we will say that you were very ill after the departure of Annie and simply made a very poor decision, which you now greatly regret.”
I didn’t reply.
“Helen, that’s the very least you can do.”
I couldn’t speak. I wasn’t sorry; I hadn’t made a mistake; I wasn’t ill. I’d never been healthier, happier in my life. I would have thrived with Peter if only, if only she had let me go. I leaned in toward her, my face warmed by the fire.
“I’m waiting,” she said.
I took her hand in mine. Soft in my palm, Mother’s fingers suddenly felt different. They felt drained of life, fragile. I realized how afraid she was. Annie was gone, I had betrayed her, and now she would have to care for me. She had suddenly become old.
I had become old.
“We leave tomorrow.” Mother turned away. “Mildred will help you pack.”
The chaos of my sister’s house rose around us. Mother went to bed and I stood in the kitchen with Mildred. I couldn’t face resuming my life without Peter, but I couldn’t stay in Montgomery, either. Katherine banged on her high chair tray, and acrid smoke from the waning fire told us we needed wood. When Mildred put baby Katherine in my arms, I felt dizzy with all I had lost, and afraid of how to go on without Peter.
“Come.” Mildred took the baby from me and led me upstairs. As rain tapped on the roof, Mildred said, “Helen, I won’t—I can’t—mention what you’ve done. But you’re a Keller. Do you know the way we get over things? We keep moving.”
Down the hall in my room I thought of my loss of Peter, but also of Mother’s great loss when I was young. The way she threw herself into work after I went deaf and blind. A kind of frenzied pace kept her going, until she could find her way after life had taken such a wrong turn.
Maybe Mother felt blinded then, as I am doubly blinded now.
Mildred lifted my suitcase out of the closet, opened it, and put my hands on it. The lock was cold to my touch. My heart cracked open.
“You leave tomorrow. Mother has rented a car to take you north.”
“I’ll pack,” I said.
How does a deaf-blind woman pack up memories? I get up from my chair, and fold my coat, lingerie, and dresses into my bag. My Braille writer sits atop a crate. Mother has arranged for my books and furniture in Wrentham to be moved. They’ve already been loaded onto a truck to New York.
Slowly, I walk the bedroom where I’d hoped to leave behind my single life. Why did Peter betray me? Why did he not fight for me? Humiliation tastes bitter in my mouth. My dream of escape, vanished. Yes, I lied to Annie and my family, maybe I even lied to myself about Peter. Still, I don’t regret our wild love.
Once I wrote, “I remember things through my fingertips.” Anytime I want to remember Peter, I bring my fingertips together, and the sparks of his touch burn in me like blue flame.
Daybreak comes soon. Mother waits for me outside, and I am glad she does not see me cry. I leave Mildred’s guest room. I close the door, hard. I cross the drive, get in the car, and inhale the scent of loss.
We drive down the streets of Montgomery, then past the pine forest at the edge of town. I open my window and inhale the heaviness of the South. The car rolls over roads, a brisk wind picks up, Mother turns a curve, and we drive north.
I never saw or was in contact with Peter Fagan again. Eighteen months after he left me, he married another woman; they had five children. I kept the letters he wrote me in a box on my library shelf in Forest Hills, New York, until all of them burned in a house fire.
Many years passed. One day I got a letter from Peter’s grown daughter. Her father, she wrote, all of his life had kept a photo in his study, of me smiling outside a small cabin, a lake shining behind me.
“Why would Father have kept your photo all these years, Miss Keller?” his daughter asked. “Can you enlighten me?”
Afterword
The love affair between Helen Keller and Peter Fagan was real. It occurred in the fall of 1916, when Anne Sullivan Macy was misdiagnosed with tuberculosis, and ended in December of that same year. Helen Keller never publicly spoke of her affair with Peter Fagan, and never married. She lived in Forest Hills, New York, with Anne Sullivan Macy, and together they became the major fundraisers for the newly formed American Foundation for the Blind (AFB). Helen channeled her prodigious energies into her work. With Annie and the AFB she helped to improve conditions for blind and deaf-blind people around the world. By the time she died, on June 1, 1968, she had met every sitting president since Grover Cleveland, was elected to the National Academy of Arts and Letters, and had won the Presidential Medal of Freedom, as well as innumerable other awards.
The actual letters from her love affair with Fagan were burned, leaving much to the imagination. Rich resources exist—books, newspaper articles, and photographs, along with letters in archives. My extensive research of these materials allowed the love affair to come to life in this work of historical fiction. Some places and dates have been changed to preserve the narrative flow. I was able to bring Helen Keller’s voice alive through judicious use of her own words at certain points in the text.
I referred to many resources for information, first and foremost an excellent biography of Helen Keller, which details what is known about the Keller-Fagan love affair: Helen Keller: A Life by Dorothy Herrmann, and secondly a thorough and compelling biography of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan, Helen Keller and Teacher: The Story of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan Macy by Joseph P. Lash.
Equally important were letters and newspaper articles detailing the life of Helen Keller that are held in the Helen Keller Archives of the American Foundation for the Blind in New York City. The AFB kindly provided access to letters between Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan during Sullivan’s convalescence in Puerto Rico; New York Times articles of 1916 to 1917, which chronicled Helen Keller’s antiwar speeches and activism; and the letter written to Helen Keller by
Peter Fagan’s daughter. The AFB also gave me access to a recording of Helen Keller’s voice, which helped me enormously in depicting her struggles with speech.
The Emma Goldman Archives at the University of California, Berkeley, also provided a key letter from Emma Goldman to Helen Keller regarding Keller’s antiwar stance. The Wrentham Public Library in Wrentham, Massachusetts, provided a rare glimpse of Helen Keller’s bathing suit—held in its archives—which became the basis for the imagined scene of Keller’s swim in a Wrentham lake. The library also provided access to newspapers and private papers of Wrentham citizens from 1916 that helped fill in details about Keller’s hometown during the time of her affair with Peter Fagan.
My understanding of Helen Keller’s world was also deeply informed by a superb biography, Anne Sullivan Macy: The Story Behind Helen Keller, by Nella Braddy Henney, which greatly enhanced my understanding of Sullivan’s early years with her family in Feeding Hills, Massachusetts; her years of poverty at the Tewksbury Almshouse; and her education at the Perkins School for the Blind. Helen Keller, Selected Writings and The Radical Lives of Helen Keller, edited by Kim E. Nielsen, and Helen Keller: Sketch for a Portrait by Van Wyck Brooks also enriched my view of Keller’s complex life.
My knowledge of Helen Keller and her world was further expanded by the introduction to Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life: The Restored Classic, Complete and Unabridged Centennial Edition, edited by Roger Shattuck. I also learned a vast amount from Helen Keller’s own writings: the 1933 edition of The Story of My Life, which contains Anne Sullivan’s early accounts of Helen’s childhood; The World I Live In, in which Keller details her sensory relationship with the world; and Midstream, in which she writes briefly about her relationship with Peter Fagan.
I referred to A History of the Great War: 1914–1918, by C. R. M. F. Cruttwell; Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870–1930, edited by Michael S. Micale; and A Battle of Nerves, a PhD dissertation by Marc Roudebush for an understanding of the events of World War I and the impact of shell shock on soldiers.
I also learned from my correspondence with Kim Nielson, a disability scholar at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay, and was helped enormously by conversations with Helen Selsdon, the archivist at the American Foundation for the Blind.
Acknowledgments
I have so many people and places to thank for help in bringing this book to life.
My friends Glo Richardson, Risa Miller, Martha Southgate, and Jessica Keener read the manuscript at different stages and kept me going with their enthusiastic support. Glo always believed in this project, and for that I deeply thank her. Carol Dine’s poetic sensibility and line edits helped make the book shine. Rhonda Berkower was in my corner every step of the way.
Jim Schwartz provided encouragement and generously connected me with his agent.
Susan Sullivan, Hilary Nanda, and Jeremy Solomons contributed their love of literature and their collective wit every Tuesday and Thursday.
Suffolk University gave me a great place to flourish as a teacher and a writer.
Chris Castellani and all the folks at Grub Street Writers in Boston made writing and connecting with other writers a pleasure.
My superb agent, Stuart Bernstein, offered wisdom, ideas, and a path to publication that was a delight. My editor, Carole DeSanti, at Viking, contributed her keen editorial eye and full support.
Manon Hatvany and Marc Roudebush, the best friends anyone could have, made my life and the life of my family a pleasure.
My cousin Orna Feldman was my Boston family.
My sisters, Elizabeth Erskine, Catherine Tsairides, Carol Tudisco, and Maureen Bunney, and my mother, Mary Cardillicchio, gave their love. My brother, Nick Cardillicchio, was one of my real champions. His understanding of the importance of art was a gift.
My father, Nick Cardillicchio, was an inspiration to me. He died in 2008, and I miss him every day. During the writing of this book he always asked to see it. Now I can say, “Dad, here it is.”
But my greatest thanks go to my beloved husband, David Rudner, and our dear son, Gabriel Sultan. Thank you, both, for your loving support. You are the center of my life.
