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“Don’t age me.” I gave him a poke. “I was twenty-two.”
“Tell us all about yourself,” people urged. So I wrote The Story of My Life when I was a college student. The tale I told in my autobiography was one of utter triumph: of how Annie, then the Perkins School for the Blind, then Radcliffe, all carried me closer to the shores of the normal, sighted and hearing world. Books were my dearest friends, I wrote, making up for the lack of human company. But for all the success of that book, underneath there were so many things I never said. A dark jealousy burned. I tried so hard, in my writing and my books, to seem exactly like a normal, hearing and sighted person that I never showed how discouraged or disappointed I was at times. I wanted to show perfection.
Later in life I wrote, “What I have printed gives no knowledge of my actual life.” Strangers, the people closest to me, no one liked hearing that.
I felt Peter pivot so my hands moved from his chest to his back. “Okay,” he said. “You’ve got twenty-four acres, some outbuildings that seem to be sinking into the earth—”
“They’re not that bad,” I interrupted.
“Well, the roof needs repair, even the lawn needs mowing. But this place really is something,” he tapped into my palm. I felt his fingers spell I’ll see you tomorrow. “No offense,” he added, “but I hope Annie needs a long mending period before she takes over again. I’m beginning to like this job.”
“I’m beginning to like being the boss.”
“Have I told you how much I like a woman in charge?” He pinched my lower back hard, sending a jolt to my skin. “Do that again,” I said. “And you’re employee of the month.”
Pain is a dark star in my life. It’s always been with me. Even now, thirty-five years after I lost my hearing and sight, I still remember the burning, like a fireplace poker turned around behind my eyes, at nineteen months old when my fever broke, and I was going blind. Day by day, the sunlight pierced my eyes like fire. Slowly my sight burned to ash. Nothing left. My fingers still ache with the felt memory of how fiercely I rubbed my infant eyes of pain.
And my blue eyes? The ones you see in my photographs? So bright and clear that reporters say they are mesmerized by my gaze? They’re glass. I had them put in during an operation when I was a young woman so that I could look more normal, less blind.
But no pain is like the one I had when I went to Annie’s room our first night back in Wrentham and realized she knew I wanted Peter near me, and that she had made plans to send him away.
The truth is that it was Annie alone who really knew me. She read my moods instantly. With a touch or by a look I was exposed to her, like a child. After Peter left for the night I walked carefully inside the house and, touching the hall table, then the velvet loveseat by the far wall of the entryway, found my way to her room. Slowly, I went in.
The queer aluminum scent told me that Annie sat up, alert in bed, and the shrill pock of her fingers in mine once I crossed the thick-rugged floor to greet her was like an electric shock. With great force Annie threw back her quilt and told me to sit down. She must have run her eyes over me—the top buttons open on my dress, the heat in my face from being with Peter—because she said, “Sit down, now. You look like a chicken about to be plucked.”
“Don’t you mean a flower?” I idly picked up the bristle brush on her bedside table and started brushing her hair. “Your hair’s so tangled it’s like a pelt.” She bowed her head. I tugged the brush through the knots.
“Animals have pelts, Helen. Not humans.” She kept wanting to teach me, even though I was no longer a child.
“You’re curled up like an animal, a hurt one, in bed,” I spelled. Her bathrobe was matted beneath my fingers when I touched her sleeve; the breakfast tray on her bedside table gave off the odor of untouched eggs and cold coffee.
“Careful or I’ll bite.” Annie made a snapping motion with her mouth, and I was so thankful she forgot about Peter that I laughed.
“Do that again.” I held her to me.
She leaned back so I could brush more. Her shoulders, thick with muscle, weight, and worry, sank beneath the even strokes of the brush. Gradually, her breathing slowed.
The familiar scent of just we two together made the thought of Peter fade away.
Vaguely, then more strongly, a childhood memory came to me. I am seven years old, sitting at Annie’s knee in my bedroom in Tuscumbia, Alabama. Annie is filled with nervous energy: it is my first Christmas since she arrived. Annie, in order to tame me, had taken me from the house where I lived with my mother and father, and moved us into a two-room house, where just she and I lived. Every day she taught me words; every night I slept, a child, by her side. She was nineteen, an orphan. And that Christmas day she wrote a letter to her former teacher—a Braille letter I later read. In it Annie crowed to her friend, “With Helen, I have found someone who will love me completely—and can never leave.” And I never wanted to leave her, until Peter.
Annie sat up, took the brush from my hand, and said in the eerie way she had of reading my mind: “You were to be with me on the train. Instead you were alone with him—Helen, after everything I said, you’ve disobeyed?”
Before I could protest she said, “It’s done. I’ve sent for your mother. She’s already left Alabama by train; she’ll be here in a week. She’ll stay with you, every minute of the day, mother hawk that she is, until I’m better.”
“You sent for Mother? From Alabama? Without talking to me first?” I turned my head toward the window; a steady shake-shake of the floorboards told me the Boston-bound train thudded through the far woods. Peter was on that train, due to return the next day to Wrentham and the house Annie had rented for him, to be close to me. Every cell of me filled with anticipation, hummed with it until the train rushed over the slight hill behind our house.
“I thought you rented a house so he could be near.” I steadied myself by holding her bedpost.
Annie’s hand was sweating and silent in mine.
“I changed my mind.” She turned to lie back again, exhausted. “Too many things are changing around here, Helen. When your mother gets here everything will go back to normal.” Annie struggled to sit up. “When Peter gets here tomorrow I’m telling him I’m back in charge. He has to stay away.”
But even as I touched her soft hair, my fingers filled with love for her, I wanted to tell her the truth: Before Mother arrives, I will make my move. Nothing will stay as it is.
Chapter Ten
In the books I’ve written about my life I never told the whole truth. Once Peter and I came back to my rattletrap farmhouse outside of Boston everything changed for me. I know I wrote about how Peter and I had a “little isle of joy” in our love together, but I don’t think—no, I know?
?I never wrote that I did it this way: I betrayed, cut off, lied to, people I loved.
Here’s another thing I never wrote in all those books: I would do it again.
It was the second day we were back. The heat was sweltering. King’s Pond gave off the scent of wet acorns and oak leaves as Peter pulled me toward the wooden cabin set in a grove of pines by the shore. “Come with me. For a minute.” The ground gave way in soft pockets under my shoes as he led me toward the cabin. I stumbled over the rocky path, the damp air of the woods around us. Peter pulled open the cabin door and the musty odor of bathing suits and picnic baskets reminded me of summers on King’s Pond.
“We’ll tell Annie—and your mother when she gets here. Just not yet,” Peter said.
“But when? We can’t hide out here all day. The second Annie sees you she’ll have you driven to the train.”
“More like she’ll have me shot.” Peter laughed. “I saw her myself at breakfast. If looks could kill, you’d be digging my grave right now.”
“And get this dress dirty?” I picked up the hem of my favorite sassy blue dress. “Sorry, but you’d have to call the undertaker yourself.”
“Your concern is touching. Still, we have to tell her.”
“Tell her what, exactly?” I cocked my head. That morning over a hurried breakfast of oatmeal and blueberries in our kitchen, Peter dabbed at bits of blueberry staining my mouth as I told him Annie wanted to replace him.
“We’ll tell Annie that I’m staying put. The rental house is mine, I’m your private secretary, and that’s that.”
“And that’s because … ?”
“That’s because we’re …” Peter stopped.
“We’re what?” I was still a post-Victorian woman. No matter how much the people Annie and I knew preached free love, I still couldn’t claim a man as my own.
“We’re …” Still he waited.
“Comrades? I do have a Bolshevik flag hanging in my bedroom.”
