“It’s not dark,” I said again. “It’s more like something I can touch.” I didn’t tell him my whole body is a vibroscope: I remember conversations with my fingertips. Instead I leaned back against a metal tent pole as he said, “Stay here. I’ll go find us a table for dinner. They’re setting up outside the hotel across the street.” And when I leaned back, alone, I felt the air splinter, crack open a bit, as Annie, far inside the tent, was racked by a fit of coughing.
The tent pole shuddered under my hands: I couldn’t go to dinner until Annie, or Peter, came for me. In new places I couldn’t walk alone; I needed a guide. Through the soles of my shoes came the vibrations—first soft, then more insistent—of Peter’s footsteps as he came toward me across the grass. I reached out for him; he took my hand with great happiness and he spelled, “How did you know it was me?”
“I can tell people by their scents,” I said.
“All right, nature girl,” he spelled to me. “Let’s eat.”
All the way across the lawn to our hotel, where tables were clustered in a patio facing the lake, I felt like I could touch our shadows—Peter’s tall and lanky, rough to my fingers, yet blending into mine, into one.
Chapter Three
They say that love is blind. But fame can blind a person, too. That night Peter led me across the grass outside the Chautauqua tent to where rows of metal tables behind the hotel were stacked high with food: country hams with salt, yeasty breads, the sharp, green scent of peas, even the iron scent of radish floated past as he sat me down under the cool of a trailing willow tree. I moved my fingers over the slim knife, rounded spoon, plate, and thick-rimmed tumbler atop a rough place mat. Immediately “seeing” them in my mind’s eye, I picked up chicken, beets, grilled corn from heaping platters. Peter, his dark hair curling down his neck, eagerly took his place beside me when I touched him in the heat of the night—he was a slender, regal animal. “I’ll feed you,” he laughed.
“I’m blind and deaf,” I spelled back. “Not dumb. Do you think I can’t feed myself?”
I knew I wasn’t the woman he expected—and I liked it. Chicken in hand, I offered Peter a taste and he opened his mouth to bite.
“Stop.” Annie had crossed the grass from the tent and put her hand on my arm. Peter lowered his chicken leg to the plate. “Before you eat, you work,” she said to Peter, all the while rapidly spelling her words into my palm. “First, you translate the daily newspapers, then the correspondence. Got it? If a newspaper comes, you spell it to her. A letter: the same thing. You translate everything—and I mean everything—conversation, radio news reports, bits of speech on the streets as you pass by—into Helen’s hand. You can start with all this mail.”
For eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, for over twenty years Annie had spelled into my hand. She got migraines now. Her trachoma made her eyes burn so that she picked at her eyelids till her eyelashes fell out. At that moment a cough racked her again; at times that cough seemed a relief, if only because it would give her the smallest time away from her endless duties with me.
I felt Annie push the heavy mailbag across the table, closer to Peter, its ssshhuh making the table vibrate just slightly beneath my hands. A slight shift of air followed by the scent of ink told me Annie had pulled out a newspaper. “The Boston Globe,” Annie said, handing the paper to Peter. “Read to her.”
“Ah,” spelled Peter to me. “I’m your voice.” His stomach rumbled. “My appetite will have to wait.”
“You’re her link to the world,” Annie said. He reluctantly slid the newspaper open and turned to his job as secretary.
I felt lit and burning as a fuse.
Peter licked bits of cherry-apple crumble from his lips, rearranged his tie, his mouth moving fast under my listening fingers when he read of the Red Sox in the lead for the pennant—maybe they’d finally win the World Series, the bums!—then suddenly his lips turned to pools of sorrow, as he flipped to the world news:
SPECIAL TO THE BOSTON GLOBE BY NOAH SANDER
SOMME, FRANCE, JULY 5, 1916 - Yesterday, 57,000 British soldiers were killed in one day at the Battle of the Somme. Tens of thousands were wounded. The battle rages on.
“What a stupid war!” I burst out. Peter’s fingernails pressed into my palm as he read, more furious, then softer in sorrow. No one wanted to hear my opinions about politics, world events, or Socialism. And certainly not that I was against this war, and urged all Americans to stop President Wilson from entering this foolish waste of human life in the name of capitalism. The Brooklyn Eagle said that as a blind woman I had no right to speak about politics, but Peter’s hand warmed mine and I heated up in rage. “President Wilson,” I said, “is as blind as I am. Fifty-seven thousand soldiers killed in one day in France? For what?” The battle in Europe raged. And even though the United States remained neutral, daily President Wilson called for our entry into the war. Weekly my desk was piled high with desperate letters from German, French, and English soldiers blinded in battle, letters pleading for help.
Peter laughed at my comment about President Wilson.
“Why, Miss Keller,” he spelled, “you’re calling the president blind?”
“Why not? He promised peace, but now there’s talk that he’ll raise the U.S. military from one hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand in the next year. Is he blind to the consequences of that?”
“I’m a radical, too, but he is the president.”
“And I’m Helen Keller. I’ve met with every sitting president since Grover Cleveland,” I spelled into his palm.
“I know, I know. You were the darling of kings and queens by the time you were ten. They kept abreast of your activities in newspapers worldwide: how you could read Homer, and they all saw that photo of you posed so quaintly with your little white dog. Your Radcliffe graduation was front-page news in 1904, and Dr. Edward Everett Hale wrote that your future upon graduation was unlimited.”
“You …”
“I’m not a crack reporter for nothing. I’ve done my research.”
We sat together, the mailbag giving off its musty canvas scent. I didn’t want to tell Peter there was one thing that was very limited in my life.
Men.
Foolish, I know. But I believed love would be like the romance novels I secretly read. As I traced my fingers over the Braille print of those books, I knew my lover would be torrid. A darkness at his core. I would struggle against him, try to keep him away, but he would win my love by his kindness: he would know without my telling him just how to take care of me. I had dreamed of it. I can tell you now that in romance novels women have little power. I had too much. I didn’t know that a man doesn’t want to compete with a woman. They want to shine, to be the real star.
Peter rattled the mailbag so its inky scent rose to me. “Helen, can we get back to work here?” he spelled. “You rant against President Wilson. But it’s a wonder the U.S. government hasn’t thrown a net over you yet. Don’t you know that people are being tarred and feathered out in these parts for speaking up against the war?” His hand felt jittery, excited in mine.
“Apparently, Mr. Fagan, you haven’t kept up with the news. Wisconsin’s Senator La Follette is against U.S. involvement in the war against Germany. When he spoke out last week Teddy Roosevelt called him a skunk.”
“Teddy Roosevelt is rich, and famous. And you are …”
“Famous.”
“Well, one out of two isn’t bad.”
I can’t remember a time when I was not famous. After Annie taught me my first words when I was seven, she wrote to Michael Anagnos, the head of the Perkins School, of my success: the Fifty-Sixth Annual Report of the Perkins School, published worldwide, called me “a phenomenon” and “most remarkable.” The news of my “miracle” spread. Religious leaders said I was proof of the purity of the human soul. Alexander Graham Bell called my progress “without parallel.” The Nation profiled me. Half of Tuscumbia visited my house. Reporters swarmed at my door, even while we slept.
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I was ten years old.
Stories of me were carried around the world: soon President Cleveland had invited me to the White House, I was enrolled at Perkins for free, and overflowing crowds met me wherever I went. By the time I was sixteen Andrew Carnegie had invited me for dinner. I wrote my autobiography as a sophomore at Radcliffe College, and when it was published Mark Twain called me “a wonderful creature, the most wonderful in the world.”
The truth is, I was never unknown, but often lonely.
I reached for Peter’s hand.
Then I felt him reach into the bag and pull out a letter. It gave off a dampness. He tapped the contents of the letter, from the sister of John Beutler of Cologne, Germany, into my hand:
Miss Keller,