I felt as if a light fell over me. His voice flowed through my fingertips.
“Don’t you ever want other things?” he said.
I leaned into him.
“Do you want to hear this?”
“Yes.”
“Helen, kiss me.”
I felt his warm breath on my mouth. “Wait. Not yet.” I fumbled with the little glass figurines on my desktop, suddenly unsure. “Will you—” I moved suddenly toward the door and opened it for him to leave. “Give me some time?” I said, and stumbled over my opened suitcase. When I slipped, Peter steadied me.
“I’m getting pretty good at this.”
“Catching me?” I picked up the hem of my floor-length calico dress and swept it free of dust.
“Keeping you on your own two feet is more like it.” He followed me back into my room.
“Kiss me.” He pulled me back to him.
His mouth salt, willow trees, pear.
I held his face with my hands, his button-down shirt scratchy as he pulled me close. His hands warmed my back.
“Annie is sick. I have to check on her upstairs.”
“Right. Another person who needs you.” He stroked my cheek.
I leaned forward. “We’ll be home soon. When we get there, walk down the hill behind my house to King’s Pond. Meet me there for a swim. I promise you’ll like what you see.”
He paused, his palm tentative. “Listen. I can barely do the crawl. But if you want me in the water with you, I’m there.”
I was so relieved that I joked, “If you start drowning I’ll let you sink like a stone.”
“You’re not my lifeguard?” He felt the smile on my face, and pulled me closer. “Helen, if I start slipping under, I’ll take you down with me.”
We both laughed.
Chapter Eight
Why was I so brazen—so forward with Peter? I was thirty-seven years old and had never before been alone with a man, never mind with a man with a mouth like night. And yet I’d always preferred men’s company to women’s. When I was at Radcliffe, Annie wanted to hire a smart young man to help me with my studies. But Mother immediately stopped her. She’d met with the young man. With his deep brown eyes and lovely Italian hands he was far too handsome to work with me, Mother said. I might be taken with him, and forget about my studies. She ordered him replaced. Now, with Peter near, all that was pent up inside me came alive. I was a rushing train.
He saw so much—maybe too much—of me.
I waited, fidgeting, on the hotel’s sweltering front porch the next day. The morning air crackled around me, the ting-ting-ting of the flagpole’s metal reverberated in the breeze, and the scent of motor oil and rubber tires rose from the hotel driveway. I inhaled Peter’s scent of pine soap and coffee as he ran up and down the steps. I knew he was packing the waiting taxi cab with our six trunks.
Just then the slap of footsteps on the porch made me stand up straight. “Where are our suitcases?” Annie had come out of her room and stood beside me, brushing her fingers against my hand. I inhaled her menthol cough.
“Peter put them in the cab.”
“Well, at least he’s learning how to treat women. Not like most men we know.” Her hand was tense in mine, and my heart sank at how sick I felt she was. Then Peter returned for us. He installed Annie in the front seat of the cab. The closing door made a reassuring thump.
He took my arm.
“I’m sure you’re a crack navigator.” Peter guided me into the backseat. As he slid in beside me, I was oddly relieved that Annie was in the front.
I felt the car roar to life.
“Boston, here we come,” Peter yelled. The cab swerved through town. I rolled down the window. The scent of the bakery, the gas station, and then the camphor scent of the Baptist Church I knew stood at the far edge of town told me we were leaving Wisconsin for good, but then the cab came to a stop. The rumble and bustle of Appleton’s train station moved through my arms and legs.
“Train station. Time to get out.”
“Wait a minute. Aren’t we taking the bus?”
“I checked the schedules. The bus takes seventeen days. Nothing personal, but you’d die of boredom. I can’t spell into your hand for that long and she”—he jerked his head toward Annie—“looks to me like she needs to see a doctor pretty quick.”
“But you read the paper to me this morning. The local railroad workers are striking for an eight-hour workday. I won’t cross a picket line. We’ll hire a car.”
“Quiet, lady.” Peter went on, “Annie’s too sick to share the driving. And as far as I can tell you’re not exactly an ace behind the wheel.”
“You’ve got a point there.” I felt the cold air as he steadied me by the open cab door. Annie slept fitfully in the front seat. I hoped she wouldn’t wake up just yet. I didn’t want her to detect what I was feeling. I wasn’t his idol. I was just Helen. I would follow wherever he led.
All my life I’ve wanted to fit in. I was the first blind deaf-mute to go to Radcliffe College. I thought I’d make friends with the other girls, but they avoided me in the hallways. They didn’t know the manual fingerspelling language, and I couldn’t speak to them. They gave me a puppy I named Phizz, and nights when the girls were sledding in Boston’s cold with their boyfriends, I sated my hunger for company with Annie, both of us unsure if we’d ever fit in.
Only one of my professors bothered to learn fingerspelling, and since most of my books weren’t available in Braille, Annie had to spell their contents into my
hand for hours each day. During classes she sat by my side and spelled the lectures word by word to me.
On those hot summer nights, when the other girls were out past curfew, Annie slept in her room in our apartment on Boston’s Newbury Street. And I pushed away my copies of Cicero in Latin, and Molière in French, and pulled out the romance novel The Last Days of Pompeii. I ran my fingers over the Braille pages about the blind slave girl, hips undulating in the garden, while men picked flowers from her basket. As I read, branches scraped my window. In the night’s heat I felt strangely excited.
But Annie came into my room and pounced on me: “Caught, discovered, trapped!” She pulled the novel away. If I read books like that, she said, she would not utter one word to me for an entire twenty-four hours. Without Annie spelling into my hand in the Radcliffe classroom, isolation would surround me. I slid the book away.
Annie needed me to stay childlike.
But Peter treated me like a woman.
“Right this way, madam.” He led me deeper into Appleton’s station. Annie followed, her scent like sour rain. As we moved toward our waiting train, he said the walls above the ticket counter were peppered with posters supporting the war in Europe.
“Don’t get carried away,” Annie spelled as she walked by my side. “Most of the loafers in here are just reading their newspapers, checking their watches, waiting for trains. They don’t care about the war at all. You two can talk antiwar propaganda when we get on the train. As for me, I’m going straight to bed.”
The trees outside the train station sent sparks of pine scent into the air as Peter led me and Annie up the metal steps, while he repeated the conductor’s shout: “Last caaaaall for Pullman train one seventy-five to Boston.” I felt the metal door slam shut. Peter installed Annie in a sleeper car in front of us, and led me to the club car.
The train whistle shirred the air as our car moved down the track.