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As I slid into a leather seat by the window, Peter passed a packet of letters to me. I felt his hand as he plied open a bulging envelope. “Your latest bills, I think.”
“Let’s get through these as quick as we can.” I drummed my fingers on the table. “And then it’s time for lunch and a drink.”
“Yes, boss.” He covered my fingers with his. “The sooner we finish these the better.”
Roof repair: $1,750.00 Payment thirty days overdue
Painting: $900.00 Payment due immediately
Taxes: $1,400.00 Unpaid. Penalty due
“Helen.” He took my hand. “You and Annie run a bit of an unsteady ship.”
The train rocked so unevenly that I held the table’s edge. “You’ve been with us one full week already, and you’re just realizing that?”
“Well, I am a quick study.” He steadied me with his hand.
I breathed easier. “I’m suddenly thirsty.” The passageway thudded with the tread of other passengers lining up at the far end of the car for lunch. “Will you get us some drinks?” I could smell the coffee, the tang of whiskey sours in the club car. “And some lunch?” I pushed him toward the edge of our seat. “Let’s put these away for now.” I slid the envelope of bills back toward him.
“Your wish is my command. If you want to deny you have problems, I’m with you. When I come back with lunch we’ll talk about what will happen during our Wrentham swim, instead.” He moved away, leaving behind a pocket of air. He would soon realize the extent of the trouble Annie and I were in. But I pushed that thought out of my mind and thought about his return instead.
I learned denial early. At age seventeen, I first felt sexual desire; it was while I was reading a romance novel. Then one morning I asked Annie about sex and she said, “Forget it. That’s not for you. Channel it into your work.” And I did. Fifteen cities in two months and I earned enough money for our house, clothes, and food. My very life depended on my never seeming different from those in the sighted world. My motto, according to Annie, was simple: never complain. So as the train shook furiously over the cross-country tracks, and I felt Peter approaching, I did what anyone good at denial would do. I picked up my paper napkin, and spread it over my lap.
I was ready for a hearty lunch. Peter handed me a lunch bag. I pulled it open, plucked out a ham sandwich, with its scent of salt and the smokehouse, and bit in. I was famished. “Read me the news?” I pushed the newspaper toward him.
While munching on his grilled cheese sandwich, Peter rattled the New York Times from where it had fallen to the floor. He shook it open to an article on the war wounded and read. “Listen to this. There’s this medical officer—Charles Meyers—who’s coined a new diagnosis. It’s called shell shock. It happens when soldiers—kids, really—see and hear too much death and they lose their minds. Some even become blind and mute. One seventeen-year-old in the trenches in the Battle of the Somme saw a shell explode fifty feet away; he was unconscious for days. When he woke up his hands and feet shook uncontrollably. The doctors found nothing physically wrong. Still, he was blind and mute.”
“Like me.”
“Not exactly.” Peter’s voice moved faster as he read. I kept my fingers close to his mouth to keep up. “This kind of blindness, or muteness, is all in the mind. According to the paper, two thousand seventeen men were sent to one British hospital for shell shock.”
“Peter.” I turned and ran my fingers over the taut skin of his cheekbones. “Why don’t you write an article about that? I can just see it in the New York Times. ‘Special Report from Peter Fagan, Correspondent.’” I picked up my napkin, wiped my mouth, and hoped there were no crumbs.
Peter leaned toward me. “You’re a mess, missy.” He deftly brushed the rest of the crumbs from my blouse. I wished I had made more of a mess.
“Sure, I can write a piece on shell shock, but the Times will never take it. I’m just a former stringer for the Boston Herald, remember? Now let me clean off the rest of your pretty dress.”
“Stop that. Eat your lunch. Keep your hands off me.” I laughed. “They’ll take it if I ask them. I wrote for them. They’ll take it if I say so. We’ll be a team. We’ll make the money we need.”
“What do you mean, ‘we’? I’m just your secretary while Annie’s too sick to work. If you don’t mind my being so bold, it looks like the burden is on you. You’re the one who’s world famous.”
He ran his fingers over my cheek. “I love that you’re an independent woman.” He lit a cigarette, the tobacco ripe and tart.
I nodded, my jaw tensed.
“Isn’t it something?” What I didn’t tell him is that I’m more dependent than he thinks. There are some things about which I keep mute. Because I have no intention of losing this man.
“Wait.” I stopped Peter from reading more. “I think I’ve heard enough for one day.”
Peter let the paper slide from his hands.
For the first time, we sat together without anything to say.
I leaned back in my seat and breathed in the hot air, the singed ash from the train, the acres of barley, wheat, and corn fields as we passed. And I daydreamed that Peter peeled back my dress. I arched up to him and we tossed and rolled together in a world without end. Through the night, the train-fast night.
Chapter Nine
In that way Peter brought alive cravings in me, like an empty mouth. To be with someone who didn’t idolize me. Who saw me as a grown woman who wanted a life of her own, instead. But I didn’t know about the cravings I brought alive in him. Some were for fame. Others for some kind of power. All were contradictions. None of them really were clear. I told Peter none of this.
Instead I betrayed my loyalty to Annie—I should have been by her side in her sleeping car; she was so sick. But no. I followed Peter, eagerly, into the club car just to sit by him that first day on the train, and the next day, and the next. I stayed by his side all the way home to Boston, then out to Wrentham, where we installed Annie in her second-floor bedroom, then we went outside, to be alone in the night air. The hot-tar scent of the street and the smoky traces of a nearby barbecue wafted toward me on the breeze. I slid my fingers into Peter’s open palm when he said, “Massachusetts has a hurricane season?”
“We never have hurricanes here.” I paused, smiling at what I knew would come next.
“Not by the looks of this place.” I felt him move his head back and forth, taking in the disheveled state of my house. “What on earth happened here?”
Through the windows opening onto the porch, I knew he saw the living room lit by a lamp. There, two ragged chairs that felt like oats, rough to the touch, faced each other in front of the enormous fireplace, a rickety table between, a Braille Monopoly game, newspapers, old books scattered across other tables and the floor, and wisps of dog hair from my Great Dane, Thora, clung to the ragged braided rug. “John used to help us keep things up. But it’s hard now that he’s gone.”
Peter said nothing at first, at the mention of John. Annie’s husband, a ne’er-do-well who walked out on her two years ago, was Peter’s boss at the Boston Herald. An odd tension made him close his hand into a fist. “I know he’s your boss,” I said. “I’m not criticizing. But when he and Annie were married and he lived here, he did the odd jobs—built bookcases, put in the screens for summer. He even stretched a wire a half-mile long across the stone wall in the woods so I could walk alone. But now that he’s gone, well …” I faltered.
“I hardly know the man.” Peter stretched his fingers and traced my palm. “Besides, he was my boss. You’re the boss now. In fact I’m taking the train into Boston tonight to pack up my apartment. Annie rented me a house nearby so I can be at your beck and call from now on.”
“And don’t you forget it.” I was so relieved and excited that he would be near that I didn’t even mind if he noticed the living room ceiling: after a storm, while Annie and I were away on a lecture tour last year, great patches of water leaked over two-thirds of the ceiling, l
eaving it a sodden, dark, tea-colored brown. She had fingerspelled the disaster into my hand.
“Here’s what I don’t understand,” Peter said. “It’s you and Annie, traveling the country to paltry audiences this year, as far as I can see, yet you’ve got this house, and me, and if I’m not mistaken there’s a servant inside lighting the lamps and primping himself, eager to see you the minute we walk in.”
“And?” I was ready to be more honest than I should have been. “You want to know how I manage this? How a deaf, blind woman in 1916 can afford her own house?”
“Something like that, yes.” He smelled of clover and fresh-cut grass. I would have said anything.
“This house cost me my life,” I said.
“What?”
“You know.” I waited. “The book …”
“Oh, The Story of My Life.”
“Paid for it,” I exhaled. My autobiography had been published to critical acclaim when I was only in my twenties.
“Looks like you bought this place in the halcyon days.” I felt his fingers peeling the decayed paint from the windowsill. “Spent money you couldn’t afford. But that’s not the strangest part. Let me get this straight. You wrote the story of your life when you were what, twenty-five?”
