Page 24 of Helen Keller in Love

I stood on the balls of my feet, my head to one side, my corset open. Then he took off my skirt. I inhaled.

He was up against me. I raised my hips to him.

“Take.”

Peter pushed his life into me, he pushed into me with his thin hips, pushed in again, again.

The sky opened. The world came in.

I can’t really remember what happened next. I know great flocks of Canada geese honked outside the cabana as I woke and felt Peter beside me. Their cries seemed to unsettle the sky, bring a chill, so I pulled my jacket over my bare skin. “Take that off,” Peter said, stroking me. “I want to see you.”

He trailed his fingers over my mouth. I read his lips. “Russia,” he said. “Helen, I’m planning a trip there. There’s a revolution brewing. It will change the world.”

“You’re like Emma Goldman,” I said.

“I’m not an anarchist.”

“I know. Do you know what she said about me?”

“Do tell.” He moved his palm over my belly.

“She said, ‘All my life I’ve searched for one great American woman. And Helen Keller is the one.’”

“Are you ever,” Peter murmured. “I’ll take you with me. To Russia.”

“Every girl’s dream honeymoon.” At that moment I didn’t care about the future. I slid closer to his warm body. He tugged me up until I was over him.

“Again?” he said. If I could go back to that time, it would be then. When all my worries floated out into the woods, far, far away.

Before nightfall Peter guided me out of the cabana. I walked so easily over the bumpy wooded path back to the farmhouse. When Peter tried to open the back door, it got stuck.

“Push,” I said, standing on the grass behind him.

“What do you think I’m doing?” The door opened. He pulled me into the back hallway. “What the hell?”

“What is it?”

“This.” He guided my hand to a long piece of metal. Rounded, smooth, it curved down to a cloth canopy.

“Is it a …”

“Stroller. A baby stroller. Lifted from John’s apartment by a furious Annie.” Peter held my wrist. “Here, shake.” I felt the rat-a-tat-tat vibrations of a toy rattle. “My God, she’s even taken the kid’s toys.”

I stood still. “Peter, what if someday, you and I—”

“Don’t get any ideas, darling.”

That night I had trouble falling asleep. Annie was pacing in the hallway. When I finally did drift off, I dreamed of a small child lying between Peter and me. Sun, earth, moon. We three.

Chapter Twenty-six

October’s wind blew brisk the next morning. Mother and I, out for an early morning walk, passed the lopsided oak tree by the side of my house and turned into the hallway before breakfast, our faces chilled. Beyond the hallway was the music room, where a piano, a violin, and a gramophone sat covered with dust. “Annie took every last thing out of that apartment that she could carry,” Mother said. “She even had this piano shipped here, express. What could she possibly want with it?”

“It doesn’t matter.” I couldn’t stop thinking about Peter.

“Does she still play it?”

“Play what?”

“The piano, Helen.” Mother shook my wrist.

“Oh, she will, you know, for concerts and such.” We faced each other, and the wind rattled the windows. I hooked my arm through Mother’s. I couldn’t wait to get on the train with Peter, and I almost missed when Mother said, “Helen, remember when you were young, you used to try to play the piano?”

“Yes. Once I wrote that I often felt like a music box with all the play shut up inside me.”

“And not anymore?” Mother said.

I just smiled.

“Helen, did you wash your hair this morning? It’s still wet. You shouldn’t bathe in this chill. It’s bad for you. You could catch a cold.”

“I’ve never felt better in my life.”

“That’s what Annie thought, too. But look at her now. You should be more careful.”

“I’m beginning to think I should be less careful.”

“Beginning to think?” I felt Mother laugh. “You weren’t so careful years ago when you sent that letter about—oh, I won’t say it.”

“What letter?”

“Oh, never mind.”

“Oh, that letter: the one where I talked about venereal disease. Yes, Mother, I did send that letter, to Ladies’ Home Journal, in fact.”

“What did they want with a letter on such a thing?”

“Mother, that letter saved thousands of babies from blindness. Doctors knew from the 1860s that venereal disease in mothers caused newborn children to go blind at birth—”

“I know, Helen. But no one would write about it. It is a delicate subject.”

“That’s why I wrote it: of all people they’d listen to me.”

“Helen, why must you always be the one spearheading things?”

The tenseness in Mother’s jaw told me it was a strain for her to be in Boston. She had to put up with my outspokenness and Annie’s temper tantrums and her illness. “Look at this.” Mother pulled a letter from her dress pocket. She spelled for me the invitation from the Mark Twain Foundation. “It’s the sixth anniversary of Twain’s death. You and Annie are invited to speak at a dinner honoring his legacy.”

I said nothing.

“Helen, this is exactly the type of thing you should be doing.”

“Of course, I’ll go. But I can’t leave this week. I’m going to Boston tomorrow with Peter—”

“You’ll do no such thing.”

“Mother, I know you don’t want to think about it, but I do need—”

“What? Money? From a rally? Even I know that doesn’t pay much.”

“It’s not the money, Mother.”

“Are you doing it to get away from Annie and her grief?”

And then I lied again. “Peter and I are meeting with my publisher. They may want me to do a new book.”

“I didn’t know you were writing a new book.” Mother put her arms around me.

“You won’t believe how many new things I’m doing.”

Mother stepped back. “Why don’t you tell me? I have all day.”

“Peter will be here any minute now. I’ve got to get ready. We need to go over my speech.”

“Helen, I’m writing your sister, Mildred. You and Annie simply can’t manage here, and soon Mr. Fagan will be … leaving your employ. If it turns out that Annie does in fact have tuberculosis, I’m taking you to Mildred’s house in Montgomery immediately.”

“Perfect. I can’t wait to leave,” I said.

I need to remember happiness, because of what happened next. Rain pelted the kitchen windows, and dampness permeated the house when Annie’s scent of camphor and medicine told me she’d walked into the hall. “Helen, my room. Now,” she said. Surprised by her staccato fingerspelling in my hand, I left Mother by the fireplace in the kitchen and followed Annie. The rug was thin under my feet, the chair by her bed stiff. As I ran my palm over Annie’s face, her mouth tightened, and the narrowness of her lips made sympathy enter my heart.

“I want you to be the first to know, Helen.”

“Know? About Peter and that woman? But I do know.”

“Will you for one minute stop talking about Peter?”

“I can explain.”

“Helen, I don’t want to hear his name again until hell freezes over.”

“That long?”

“The doctor was here. Yesterday, while you were out …”

“Walking.”

“Yes, Helen. While you were out walking, the doctor came. The results are unequivocal.” She brought a handkerchief to her mouth and coughed, coughed.

“This damned disease. They should call it the Red Death, not the White.” The scent of blood rose to my nostrils from her handkerchief.

“Three days, they’ve given me,” Annie said, her fingers unsteady. “They sa

y I have to be there in three days.”

“Be where?”

“A damned sanatorium, in upstate New York. Here’s their cure: I go to this rest home with a bunch of other sufferers and we wrap ourselves up in woolen coats; they cart us out onto a cold porch and we breathe fresh, frigid air all day. Not for me. I’m not going there. Last week I saw a sign in the window of the Wrentham Travel Agency for sunny Puerto Rico. That’s where I’ll go to recuperate. At the very least I’ll be warm. Helen, get out of the way.” She pushed past me, and a moment later I felt the closet door open, then the thump of her suitcase on the bed. “Let’s fill this up with my best clothes. If I’m going to die I’ll be tanned and well dressed.”

“Annie, stop it.”

“Tuberculosis, the gift that keeps on taking. It’s taking me from you, and leaving you with that damned Fagan. Thank the lord your mother is here.”

Too nervous—panicked, really—to help Annie, I walked up and down her room, ambivalent. Peter loved me, promised to care for me. But I smelled the rose perfume from the gray chiffon dress Annie packed in her suitcase and I remembered her wearing it at our last dinner. I realized with a terrible ache that she would soon be gone. I put one hand over my mouth to keep the grief out.

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