Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller

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Blind Rage

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Georgina Kleege

Blind Rage Letters to Helen Keller

Gallaudet University Press Washington, D.C.


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Gallaudet University Press Washington, D.C. 20002 http://gupress.gallaudet.edu © 2006 by Gallaudet University All rights reserved Published in 2006 Printed in the United States of America ISBN 1-56368-295-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kleege, Georgina, 1956– Blind rage : letters to Helen Keller / Georgina Kleege. p. cm. isbn 1-56368-295-8 (alk. paper) 1. Keller, Helen, 1880–1968—Miscellanea. 2. Kleege, Georgina, 1956– —Correspondence. 3. Blind-deaf women—United States—Biography— Miscellanea. 4. Blind—Psychology—Miscellanea. I. Title. hv1624.k4a3 2006 362.4'1092—dc22 [B] 2006014539 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.


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As always, for Nick


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Contents A Note to Readers ix Acknowledgments xi part one Consciousness on Trial 1 part two Full Body Contact 45 part three Working the Pump 93 part four The Hand’s Memory 157 A Note on Sources 209


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A Note to Readers I wrote this book to exorcize a personal demon named Helen Keller. While most people revere Keller as a symbol of human fortitude in the face of adversity, to me she always represented an example I could not hope to emulate. She was both totally blind and profoundly deaf but managed to graduate from Radcliffe College, to publish numerous books and articles, and to travel the world as an international spokesperson for the blind. I am blind too, but not as blind as she was, and I have enjoyed many educational opportunities and employment advantages that were only dreams for her. Since I was a child, I have heard her name invoked as a reminder that I should be grateful for how lucky I was. I resented her for this, and suspected that her life, especially versions that appeared in my school books and in popular entertainments like The Miracle Worker, were too good to be true. As an adult, I began to investigate her story more fully. I read her autobiographical writings and the many biographies published about her. I discovered many events and relationships that seemed at odds with what I had always been led to believe. But there was also something missing. It was as if her need to be an inspirational icon made it impossible for her ever to express any rage, fear or sorrow, even when her experiences would have prompted these emotions in anyone else. By turns, this baffled and infuriated me. I found myself conducting lengthy interior dialogues where I would question her at length about the thoughts and feelings I sensed she must have had while these events transpired. I describe them as dialogues, when in fact no answer ever came back from her. But she had become a very real presence in my imagination, defiant of my attempts to put words in her mouth, and eloquent in her silence. This book re-creates these conversations through a series of letters. It is a one-sided correspondence that invites the reader to inhabit Keller’s ix


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A Note to Readers

consciousness and respond in her stead to what I depict as some of the key moments of her life. Although based on facts, this is not a conventional biography or historical novel because those genres would keep her at too great a distance. Instead, I have written letters to her that allow for some intimacy between us, some exploration of our shared experiences and sensibilities.


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Acknowledgments Sections of this book appeared in slightly different form in Gendering Disability (Bonnie G. Smith and Beth Hutchison, eds.), The Michigan Quarterly Review, and Southwest Review. I am especially grateful to Willard Spiegelman whose publication of the first fragment of this book, also titled “Blind Rage,” gave me the confidence to continue. Maureen Novak and Beth Ina were my reading and research assistants for this project. They read me all of Keller’s work and a great deal of secondary material. Their mingled voices remain in my mind’s ear, imbuing Keller’s writing with their intelligence and energy. I am thankful to Melanie Rae Thon for her early encouragement of this project. Brenda Brueggemann has been a tireless source of ideas and friendship. Many other friends and colleagues have read or heard portions of this book and offered insights and inspiration. Among them, I especially want to thank: Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Catherine Kudlick, Kim Nielsen, Tom Couser, Anne Finger, Simi Linton, Sue Schweik, Katherine Sherwood, Paul Longmore, Corbett O’Toole, Lynn Bloom, Mark Willis, Jean Stewart, Laurie Block, and Harilyn Rousso. Ivey Wallace and Deirdre Mullervy at Gallaudet University Press have managed the publication process with efficiency and grace. Finally, this book would not have been written without the support and love of my husband, Nick Howe. He had the generosity to share our life with Helen Keller, and helped me to pursue my obsession at home and on the road.

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part one

Consciousness on Trial February 3 Dear Helen Keller: Allow me to introduce myself. I am a writer and part-time English professor. I am American, married, middle-aged, middle class. Like you, I am blind, though not deaf. But the most important thing you need to know about me, and the reason for my letter, is that I grew up hating you. Sorry to be so blunt, especially on such short acquaintance, but one of the advantages of writing to a dead person is there’s no need to stand on ceremony. And you should know the truth from the start. I hated you because you were always held up to me as a role model, and one who set such an impossibly high standard of cheerfulness in the face of adversity. “Why can’t you be more like Helen Keller?” people always said to me. Or that’s what it felt like whenever your name came up. “Count your blessings,” they told me. “Yes, you’re blind, but poor little Helen Keller was blind and deaf, and no one ever heard her complain.” I am not alone in this. Many disabled people think you did our cause a lot of harm. Your life story inscribes the idea that disability is a personal tragedy to be overcome through an individual’s fortitude and pluck, rather than a set of cultural practices and assumptions, affecting many individuals that could be changed through collective action. Lately, for reasons I can’t entirely explain, my feelings about you have mellowed. It occurred to me that I should not hold you responsible for the use others made of your life story. This led me to dip into your autobiographical writing for the first time. Even more surprising, it led me to take a road trip to visit your childhood home, Ivy Green, in Tuscumbia, Alabama. And I thought you’d like to know what I found there. I went with my husband Nick, who is almost always up for a road trip. We took the house tour, which was standard fare for a local-hero museum.

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The guide was a woman pushing sixty, probably a volunteer, apparently reciting a script. She rattled off a number of facts about the town, the region, and antebellum architecture—all the predictable stuff. Then, in one of the downstairs rooms, she pointed out a carpet on the floor that had been woven especially for you by I forget whom. She explained all this, then said, “Isn’t it lovely?” We murmured agreement. Then she said, “Too bad Helen Keller never saw it.” Her voice had a throaty throb as she delivered the line. I realized that the statement was supposed to catch us up short, jar us out of our complacency, remind us that you were deaf and blind. We were supposed to feel grateful and lucky, and intone a private prayer of gratitude: “I wake each day and thank the Lord I was not born Helen Keller.” I should have expected nothing less. Where better to deliver the “Why can’t you be more like Helen Keller” message than in your childhood home? I should have steeled myself against it, but the resentment I feel about the message is so old and deep, it’s like a knee-jerk reflex. And on this occasion, I turned my resentment on the woman pointing out the carpet that poor little you never saw. I said, “But she could touch it.” “What?” the guide said. “She what?” “She could touch it,” I said. “She had the sense of touch. One of the pleasures of a nice carpet is texture. She could feel it. She could walk on it barefoot. She had an imagination. Someone could describe it to her, and she could imagine it.” I was talking like a crank. There’s a certain vibration that comes into a person’s voice when they’re going off the deep end, and I had it. I could feel the guide eyeing me askance. Was this how I was going to be? I was spoiling her spiel. I could feel the rest of the tour group—a van load of Baptists from Tennessee—looking away. In any case, I quieted down and we moved on. I felt the guide was leery of me. As she pointed out the pump organ in the parlor, she paused briefly. I sensed she was supposed to say something about how you never heard its beautiful music, but since she had a crank in the crowd today, she dropped the line. As we surveyed each room from the doorway, our guide was at pains to tell us which pieces of furniture actually belonged to your family, which were of the period, and which were merely reproductions. I’ve been on enough such house tours to know authenticity is always an issue. I wished


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Consciousness on Trial

she would let me walk around the rooms and touch something. This was not the most blind-friendly museum I’ve ever visited. At Louis Braille’s house in France, they let you put your hands on anything that’s not in a case. But perhaps fewer blind people visit your house. As if to confirm this, our guide spent a lot of time talking about the photographs on the walls of the central hallway. Although I have some residual vision, I don’t see photographs well. Nick told me what I was looking at and read me the labels. There was one of you at about age seven, around the time Anne Sullivan, your teacher, came into your life. The guide said, “Wasn’t she a lovely child?” Then she shook her head. To be accurate, I don’t know if she shook her head or not. But her tone was that of someone shaking her head at the waste of it all. As if it would be less tragic if you had been homely. I swallowed the urge to make this comment aloud. I am so used to this attitude, it hardly even registers anymore. “What a pretty girl,” people say. “Too bad she’s blind.” Apparently, beauty is wasted on us because we can’t see the reflection in the mirror, can’t see men’s heads turn when we enter a room. In this picture, you’re wearing a dress with a lot of ruffles, and your hair is an elaborate arrangement of ringlets. Do you look pretty? Nick told me that there’s a certain set to your lower lip, which makes it sound like your expression must be at odds with the prettiness of your dress and hair. He said you look posed and a bit uncertain about it. What could a photograph mean to you at that age? Later, you got the hang of it. In other photographs around the place, you’re always wearing a big smile and have your eyes aimed directly at the lens. Next to this photo, there was one of Anne Sullivan—“Teacher,” as you always called her—taken at about the same time. The guide said, “Wasn’t she pretty?” with that same “such a pity” tone. Only the pity in her case is not that she was blind or deaf or anything else. The pity in her case is that she sacrificed her life to be your companion and helpmate, when she was pretty enough to get herself a man and have a normal life. Again, I could have argued otherwise. But I didn’t. “Is she pretty?” I asked Nick. He told me she was intense looking, at once frail and fiery. I have no idea what that looks like, but the description fits what I know about her personality, so I took him at his word. Up until this point, the house tour followed the predictable course. Yes, there was that crack about the carpet, but I admit most people


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Blind Rage

probably wouldn’t have noticed it. But once we got to the dining room, things got strange. The guide called it the “famous dining room” where all your “famous battles took place.” She called you “a regular little hellion,” and narrated the struggle Teacher had getting you to eat with a fork and fold your napkin. As she was talking, I realized suddenly that she took The Miracle Worker as gospel. Outside the house, we found “the famous pump house,” a sort of fenced-in gazebo around the famous pump that is the central prop in the climatic scene of that play. But the ultimate weirdness was farther back, behind some outbuildings, where there was a permanent stage set and bleachers. There, in the summer, they stage nightly performances of The Miracle Worker. Here is where I began to articulate something, Helen. Mind if I call you Helen? My problem with all this, Helen, is not that the play is inaccurate. The playwright William Gibson drew those scenes from the letters and journals Teacher kept during her first few weeks at Ivy Green. In fact, as the play depicts, one day at the end of March 1887, Teacher pumped water over one of your hands while spelling the word water into your other, and you suddenly, miraculously, discovered language. You dropped the mug you’d been holding, said “wa-wa,” a baby-talk word you’d retained from before the illness that left you deaf and blind. Then you went on to learn to communicate with the manual alphabet, to read, to write, to speak, and generally to triumph over adversity in all the laudable ways that made you famous. Part of what disturbed me was not that this event was enshrined in your home, but that it is reenacted there. Where else in the world are events from a person’s life ritualistically re-created in this way? Jerusalem springs to mind, The Way of the Cross. And while you may find the impulse to beatify, even deify you, flattering, it comes at such a high cost, Helen, particularly for the generations of disabled people who follow you. But the main thing that disturbed me as I walked around the stage in your backyard was that The Miracle Worker is Teacher’s story, not yours. She was the one who worked the miracle and triumphed over adversity. You were the adversity she overcame. You were the site of miracles. And while I admire Teacher’s accomplishment, the play distorts things a little. You were, in part, responsible for this. Throughout your life, you were always quick to give Teacher the lion’s share of credit for your education.


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And you narrated the same events—the dining room battles, the pump scene—in your own memoirs. But I went to your house to find something else, another story. As we walked around the stage and back to the house, I scuffed the ground to raise a dust. I inhaled it. I guess I was hoping there might still be a few molecules of you left there, the you before language, the pre-Teacher you. I wanted to feel you there somewhere. I imagined you, age five or six, crouching in the shadows under the back steps. Your hair was a wad of tangles. Your face and hands were sticky with some sweet you filched from the pantry. Your pinafore was crumpled and stained. Your feet were shoeless, caked with mud. As I conjured your presence, I felt energy emanating from you, which was both curious and hostile. But not fearful, never fearful. I knew that if I bent down to touch you, you would catch hold of my hand. Your touch would not be gentle. You would smear your hand around my face to check if I was someone you knew. You would pat my pockets, looking for candy. Finding none, you might thrust my hand away, slapping at me, kicking at my legs with your calloused heels. Then you would scramble away from me, scoot backward into the darkness. That was the child I went there to find, not the “lovely child” of the photographs, the paragon of cheerfulness and industry. In your adult writings when you attempted to re-create your pre-linguistic experiences, you called that child “Phantom.” I wish you’d found a different name. Phantom is too ghostly, too wispy, when my sense of that child is solidly corporeal, a dense tangle of physical needs and desires. And that child had a language of sorts. Before Teacher came, you were able to communicate with gestures and signs, some of them quite elaborate. You had signs for every member of your family, all the servants, and the regular visitors to your home. Your sign for your mother was to pat your cheek. Your sign for your favorite aunt was to tie imaginary bonnet strings under your chin. Your sign for your father was to put on imaginary eyeglasses and read an imaginary newspaper. And you had signs for things as well, typically food, since as for most young children, food loomed large in your concerns. If you wanted bread and butter, you would saw at the air with the edge of your hand then make deft, buttering motions with your finger. If you wanted ice cream, you would turn the crank of an imaginary freezer, then hug yourself and shiver. The people around you understood these signs and could generally give you


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what you wanted. The problem was that your system was not particularly versatile or flexible. In effect, you could say, “I want . . . ,” but could not communicate anything more nuanced. And no one could use your signs to communicate back to you. I may be wrong to call this gestural system of yours a language. It is perhaps no more a language than the way pets communicate with their people. For instance, one of my cats is currently sitting on the floor and meowing at me because she wants to be fed. When I don’t respond, she will jump up on my desk and pace back and forth in front of my keyboard until I give in and go into the kitchen to fill her dish. Because I do this, she will repeat these actions anytime she wants to be fed. But this is not really language. I cannot use these same behaviors to communicate anything back to her. And besides, I know you never liked any comparison between your experiences and those of animals. And you were right. Such analogies coincide too neatly with ancient prejudices some seeing-hearing people still hold about us “sense cripples,” as you called people like us. Our reliance on the less elite senses—smell, taste, and touch—seems to drop us a few rungs on the evolutionary ladder. But my point is, you understood something about language even before Teacher came. You knew that other people communicated using their mouths. You were in the habit of touching people’s faces to feel their expressions, and you observed how their mouths moved, how their lips puckered and stretched, and how they emitted small puffs of warm breath. You imitated this, walking around the house flapping your jaws at anyone you met, occasionally making noises. What happened to that child? I wanted to know. In The Miracle Worker, the story you helped to inscribe on the American collective memory, Teacher came to tame that child and turn her into the “lovely child” with all the ruffles and ringlets. At the pump, she baptized you in the font of knowledge, washing away the sin of ignorance. I recognize that this formula makes for a dramatic scene, and fits already established narrative patterns, but it oversimplifies the facts. Water was not the first word you learned. You picked up on the fingerspelling trick almost from the first day. What happened at the pump was something more subtle. The pump incident served to clarify the confusion you were having about container and contents. You had been confusing mug with milk, and Teacher wanted to show you that a mug could contain other liquids—water (who knows what


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she would have tried next) coffee, or chicken soup. The pump moment was less a miraculous revelation than a shifting of gears, allowing you to accelerate, but on the same path you’d already been traveling. This fingerspelling was not just a game or a gimmick, you discovered, but a more efficient and flexible system than the one you had previously used. In calling yourself Phantom, you distanced yourself from that child and dismissed your system of signs as primitive. In later life, you took a cue from Alexander Graham Bell and criticized the use of sign language by deaf people, advocating that they learn to speak and lipread instead. The manual alphabet you used was a transcription system, not at all the same as a sign language. A lot of people in the Deaf community today (I use the capital D indicating Deafness as a linguistic minority rather than a disability) would take exception. But I assume you’ve received many letters on this subject already. For my part, I do not believe that the child you called Phantom ceased to exist that day at the pump, and I think you were too quick to deny and denounce her. Because that child already understood about language; she caught on fast. She absorbed words like a sponge. She couldn’t get enough of them. She acquired language at such a startling rate of speed that she made herself sick. By June, you had worked yourself into such a state of nervous exhaustion that the doctor had to be summoned. He prescribed rest. But even as you lay in bed, your fingers were in motion, spelling words into your own hand, the sheer pleasure of the words making you shudder. More than pleasure, it was such a relief finally to be able to make yourself clear to the people around you. One day, you found a hole in your boot and wanted your father to send your half-brother Simpson to buy you a new one. You told your father: “new boot Simpson buggy store man.” You had a flair for the telegraphic and an intuition about how to arrange words to represent a sequence of events, causes, and effects. You loved the idea of language. Later, when you learned that there were other languages, you couldn’t get enough of them. “Chien means dog in French,” you’d say to anyone who’d pay attention. “Hund means dog in German. Canis means dog in Latin.” You understood language as layers coating every object. There was the object and then there were the many words which stood for the object, piled one on top of another, stacked up like checkers, towers of words reaching to the ceiling. Towers of Babel, you’d think and giggle to yourself with glee.


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But I digress. The point is that you were in love with the very idea of language. You were not merely hardwired for language, but seemed to have had an innate love for it. No teacher can teach that, not even one as obviously gifted as Anne Sullivan. While most people can take language for granted as a convenience, a nicety of human existence, you reveled in it. You had an affinity for it. But the event I would like to see reenacted there at Ivy Green would be how you learned to write. Teacher started early to teach you to read and write, to make the conceptual leap from language spelled into your hand to language written on paper. She would hand you an object—a doll, say—and you would spell the word to her. Then she’d give you a card with the word written in raised type or Braille, and move your hand from the card to the doll, spelling the word into your free hand. You caught onto this surprisingly fast. Soon you were constructing sentences. You would put the doll on the bed, then find the cards with doll, bed, on, and is and arrange them in the right order. “The doll is on the bed.” This game delighted you. You’d tug on her arm and point, first at the objects you’d arranged, then at the sentence, the sequence of cards lined up in a row. You’d drag in others to look at it, your parents, the servants, the dog. You’d jump up and down with pleasure over this, grunting and patting your chest with pride. Teacher was surprised by how you took to it. Of course, you’d always had an inkling about written language. People around you read. Your mother was an avid reader. And as your sign for him indicates, your father was always behind a newspaper. You knew they never welcomed your interruptions when they were engaged in this activity. And when you managed to wrestle the book or paper out of their hands, you could not for the life of you fathom what they found so enthralling there. Books smelled good, you discovered, and sometimes letter paper was scented. Occasionally you could feel some texture in the paper, but you suspected there must be more to it than that, and the frustration you felt usually led you to shred pages and strew them around the room. So when Teacher gave you those Braille cards to play with, that infuriating mystery was solved. You recognized immediately that this was the very thing you’d always needed. You’d run around the house collecting objects, then shuffle through the stack of cards for the words. “Baby sits in the chair,” you’d write. “Dog lies on the ground.” One day, Teacher came into your room and you were not there. She found a row of Braille cards on the floor outside the wardrobe, saying, “The


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girl is in the wardrobe.” She opened it and found you inside, the words the girl carefully pinned to your dress. That was when she told you your name. “Helen,” she told you. “The girl,” she touched you, then spelled, “is Helen.” You were motionless for a moment, in that way you had when something was sinking in. You fingered the cards pinned to your dress. “The girl?” you spelled to her. “The girl is the girl.” But then you got it. “The girl is Helen,” you repeated. You waved your hand at her, saying, “Card, card, Helen, card.” If you’d known how, you would have snapped your fingers with impatience. She quickly made you a card with your name on it. You unpinned the cards from your dress, found the is on the floor, and composed the sentence: “The girl is Helen.” Then you arranged yourself above this sentence, as if it were a caption to a photograph, and patted your chest with delight. OK. OK. So this last bit is not entirely accurate. I’m conflating several separate events, and inventing a few actions you may not have actually performed. It’s what writers do, Helen. Anyway, once Teacher got you hooked on writing, she then showed you how to make a narrative. Someone had caught a mouse in the kitchen and put it in a box. Teacher wrote sentences: “The cat sits on the box. The mouse is in the box. The cat wants to eat the mouse. Give the cat some milk. Give the mouse some cake.” You had not learned all these words yet, but you picked up on it right away. You fell all over yourself running to get the milk, the cake. You made new sentences with the cards: “Helen did give the cat some milk,” making yourself a character in your own story. For a long time, Helen was your only word for yourself. It seemed to take a long time for you to adopt the personal pronoun, even though I requires a lot less effort to write, Braille, or fingerspell. But you insisted on the proper name. Helen Keller. Helen Adams Keller. Helen A. Keller. Apparently, I was too thin and flimsy to bear the weight of all you wanted to say. For you, writing was the missing link that allowed you to connect yourself, the phantom inside your body, with the outside world. Writing allowed you to make an impression of your inner self—on paper, or in a row of cards on a table. You could leave the cards there and come back later and read the record of an earlier state of mind. Or you could arrange sentences on a page, seal them in an envelope, and send them off into the outside world, beyond the confines of your own body, beyond the confines of


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10 Blind Rage

your home, farther than you could walk or ride. Later, a letter would come back to you, and you could touch the impressions made by another hand, another self. Written language allowed you to transcend space and time. It allowed your mind to expand outward and encircle the universe. It allowed you to reach into the past and touch the imagination of someone long dead. It allowed you to reach into the future perhaps to imagine me writing this letter to you, dead for more than thirty years. In your house, I scuffed the floor to raise a dust. But I think there’s nothing of Phantom left there. I think they’ve swept and scoured and vacuumed away every trace. I should not be critical that when you finally got the means to put yourself on paper, you chose the “lovely child” of good table manners, cheerful industry, and saintly overtones rather than the curious, willful, resourceful child hungry for words. You were only seven years old and lacked the sophistication to represent your self in all its true complexity. And in 1887, little girls weren’t supposed to have that much depth or drive. Or maybe you recognized that the pretty, docile child would be a better medium for your message. Who am I to judge? The version of my self that I use to write this letter is no more authentic or accurate than the self you constructed in your writing. Since I found no trace of Phantom there at Ivy Green, I bought souvenirs instead. It surprised me they don’t sell bottled water drawn from the famous pump. “Helen Keller’s Miraculous Well Spring Wa-wa,” they could call it. Think of the claims they could make: “Put those pesky communication problems behind you. Foster docility and good grooming, cheerfulness and pep. Turn your little hellion into a poster child for special education.” I buy a coffee mug with a picture of Ivy Green on it. I also buy a replica of the pump. It’s made of cast iron and stands about five inches high. I have it on my desk now—as what? A source of inspiration? A reminder to love the language more? I haven’t decided yet. I pick it up and make a fist around it. The waterspout protrudes between my two middle fingers. It’s a weighty item. It would make a good weapon. I think I should get the flat, circular base inscribed with something, a word or sign of some kind, perhaps my initials, and use it to seal my letters. My letters to you, Helen. Because I guess the point is that I feel a need to write to you about these things. Now that I’ve scanned your writing, visited your childhood home,


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Consciousness on Trial 11

and more importantly released some of my hostility toward you, I begin to sense that there’s more to your story than the official version. So if you don’t mind, I’d like to ponder one or two incidents from your life and find out where it takes me. Until then, GK February 4 For instance, let’s talk about an event from your childhood. I’m talking about the winter of 1892, when you were eleven, and you were tried for plagiarism. You were a student—the star student—at the Perkins Institution in Boston. You had written a story called “The Frost King” as a gift for Mr. Michael Anagnos, the director of Perkins. He liked it so much, he published it in the school’s alumni publication. People read it and noticed that your story closely resembled “The Frost Fairies,” a published story by a Margaret T. Canby. They questioned you about it, and you denied ever having read Canby’s story. Teacher denied reading it to you. There was no copy in the library at Perkins or at your home in Tuscumbia. After a lot of questions, it came out that someone else had read it to you, three years earlier, when you were still learning to communicate with the finger alphabet, still acquiring vocabulary. So when the person read you Canby’s story, you absorbed only the gist of it, without remembering that it was a story in a book. When you sat down later to write a story for Mr. Anagnos, the story came back to you, spontaneously, as if it were your own. That was the explanation. But the explanation was not quite enough for them. They staged a sort of trial. Anagnos and eight teachers questioned you at length. Teacher was barred from the proceedings. She was on trial as much as you were. She had achieved a certain level of celebrity for teaching you to communicate, and they felt they had to offer the public some definitive proof that she was not perpetrating an elaborate hoax. They needed to assure the world that Perkins was a legitimate educational institution worthy of private and public support. So they put you on trial. They interrogated you for over two hours while Sullivan waited outside. Finally, they exonerated you. Your explanation became the official story. And life went on as before.


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12 Blind Rage

But not exactly as before, because it was more than a simple misunderstanding. In order to prove that you had not consciously copied Canby’s story, you had to answer a lot of very tricky questions. “If you didn’t copy it, where did your idea come from?” “How do you know it came from imagination rather than memory?” “How do you know the difference between imagination, memory, dream, and reality?” These are questions for psychologists, neurologists, and philosophers, not for an eleven-year-old girl, even one as eager to please as you were. And you were always a little shaky on these issues anyway. Dreams, for instance. Sometimes you woke in the morning and the dream still lingering in your mind would seem more vivid to you than waking life. One minute you’d be floating around in a rowboat with your dog Lioness licking your face, or standing on a table eating a bunch of bananas, and the next minute you’d be lying in bed smelling bacon cooking somewhere, and you found it hard to say which sensation was most real. What gets me is how during the incident itself, the trial, the inquisition—whatever you want to call it—you just sat there and took it. From all the accounts I’ve read, yours and others, you stayed calm, cool, and collected. You answered all their questions, in full sentences, without so much as a tremor or misspelling. If ever there was an occasion to throw a fit, this was it. The sheer lunacy of the charge should have been enough to trigger a tantrum. I mean, really! A child of eleven, knowingly and with malice aforethought, committing an act of plagiarism. What were they thinking? I have students, eighteen, twenty, twenty-five years old who have at best only a sketchy understanding of what plagiarism is. “I didn’t read it recently,” they tell me. “I didn’t even read it. My roommate told me about it,” or “I think I saw it on the Web.” So if they don’t get it, who could expect it from an eleven-year-old child? You were within your rights to overturn furniture, kick a few shins, throw something through a window. But no. Not you. From all I understand (and I guess the point is, I don’t understand), you just sat there and took it, answering everything they threw at you until they were satisfied and let you go. Was it shock, Helen? Is that what kept you passive, docile, and dumb in the face of such provocation? Was it the simple disbelief that comes when what’s happening to you bears no resemblance to rational reality? But even so, Helen. You didn’t so much as shed a tear. Afterward, yes, for hours, you


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lay in bed sobbing, wishing you were dead. But not while it was going on. Later, you received words of support and encouragement from many quarters. Your old friend Alexander Graham Bell expressed his dismay at the false accusation. Your future friend Mark Twain called the panel of inquisitors a bunch of “decayed turnips” and grumbled that no writer worth his salt would ever claim his ideas to be purely original. Even Margaret T. Canby wrote a letter to say she believed you were telling the truth. You felt vindicated by all this, of course. But you must have also felt it was all too easy for them after the fact, all too little too late. I know you never forgot the incident. I’d wager there was not a day in the seventy-seven years of your life that followed when you did not think about it. It would come back to you out of nowhere, unbidden. There you’d be, sitting at your desk typing a letter to your editor or standing on a stage receiving a bouquet of flowers from a little girl, and the next moment you’d feel yourself propelled backward through time to your eleven-year-old self, standing in a cold classroom while the air around you prickled with hostility and doubt, and the being inside you writhed at the injustice and humiliation. So what I want to know is not how you got over it, because I know you never really did. What I want to know is how you got through it. I can believe shock. But you were there, I wasn’t. Perhaps you could put a finer point on this, add some detail. Anything you could do to illuminate this matter would be greatly appreciated. Sincerely, GK February 5 Helen, Help me out here. I’m having trouble getting my mind around this event. I mean, exactly how do you put an eleven-year-old child on trial for anything, much less plagiarism? But try as I might, I can’t let it go either. So walk me through it, Helen. It’s 1892. As near as I can calculate, it’s late February, early March. It’s Boston, the Perkins Institution for the Blind. I imagine it taking place in a large classroom or maybe an auditorium. Not that they would have invited an audience. But they would want to lend the proceedings an air of formality. I imagine you seated at a large table on a hard, straight-backed chair. There’s


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14 Blind Rage

a larger table facing yours. At it sits Mr. Michael Anagnos flanked by the eight teachers who are serving as judge and jury. When you write about this later, you will note that four of them were blind and four were not. You did not know this at the time. And you never found out for sure which teachers they were, though I imagine you and Teacher did a good deal of speculating about it later. But on the day in question, you don’t even know how many of them there are. Since it is winter and Boston and a large room in a nineteenth-century institution, I imagine the room is cold. Your clothes are stiff with starch. Inside your clothes, you are warm and cold at once. A trickle of sweat has already slid from your armpit down your side to your waist. Perhaps knowing that this would happen, Teacher insisted on the starch. For the same reason, she yanked up your stockings with such force that your toes still feel curled under inside your shoes. She also pinned your hair off your temples with particular tightness, an extra pin on each side. I know all this because I know what it’s like to be a blind child. I know how the idea is inculcated that image matters. All the maternal admonitions about sitting up straight and keeping your clothes clean take on special meaning when the child is blind. “Don’t make a spectacle of yourself. Don’t be an eyesore.” We’ve all been through that. Your Teacher had been through it herself. She was blind through most of her adolescence, until she got someone to pay for an operation. But her early experience of blindness made her a freak for grooming, yours as much as her own. For instance, she was always on you about your nail-biting and your habit of fussing with your hair. Today, she tied a black ribbon in your hair, explaining, “Black shows respect.” You always like to know what color things are and what colors connote. Black is for mourning, you thought, but did not say it. Mourning for what, you wonder now. Who died? So you are there, in a cold room at the Perkins Institution, Boston, February, maybe March, 1892, wearing your Sunday best. Your spine is straight. Your chin is lifted. Your hands are on the table in front of you, carefully folded to conceal your ragged nails. There’s another teacher sitting next to you to interpret. We’ll call her Miss Lawson, for want of a better name. Excuse me if I freelance, Helen. Your account omits a lot of detail. I imagine her being somewhat subordinate in status to the other teachers present. Maybe she’s a trainee, even a senior student. You know


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she is there, but she is not speaking to you yet. She does not touch you. The air between you is taut and chilly. You wish Teacher were here with you, but she is not. She is on the other side of the door to your right, waiting too, probably pacing. She told you this was how it must be. You must go through this on your own. It is the point, she said. To remind yourself of this, you keep inwardly repeating, “Leave Teacher out of it.” You cannot articulate it yet, but you sense that part of what’s going on today has to do with the fact that Teacher’s life here at Perkins is different from the lives of the other teachers. For one thing, her salary is paid by your father, and for another, she is always with you. The other teachers all have rooms in another part of the building, while Teacher’s room is next to yours. Teacher sits next to you in class and spells into your hand and speaks aloud for you. She sits next to you at meals while the other teachers sit at a separate table. She is with you when people come to meet you in Mr. Anagnos’s office. Once, one of the other little girls said to you, “I wish I had a Teacher of my very own.” You wonder if some of the other teachers wish they had their very own Helen. Resentment is the word for this, Helen. You’ve sensed it even from Mr. Anagnos. He and Teacher have had a few run-ins—disagreements, they say—about you and how best to teach you. Mr. Anagnos has known Teacher a long time, since she was a student here, back when she was blind. Teacher has told you that they respect and admire each other, but sometimes you’ve felt something else between them. So you are here alone, and Teacher is outside the door pacing the hall, and Miss Lawson (or whatever her name is) sits beside you. She takes your left hand, turns it over and starts spelling into it. “Mr. Anagnos and the rest of the panel have some questions for you, Helen. You must answer the questions as best you can. You must try to tell the truth. You must say what you know to be true, not what others have told you.” I imagine this strikes several nerves at once. Why is she telling you, of all people, to tell the truth? You always tell the truth. Truthfulness is one of your defining principles. And the saying “I cannot tell a lie” has been on your mind lately. Washington’s birthday and the school pageant were just a week or two ago. But you don’t want to think about that now. Now you sense again that they are being unfair to Teacher. Not only is she excluded from the room, but they are talking behind her back. The phrase “not what


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16 Blind Rage

others have told you” is about Teacher. At least you think that’s what they mean. But you say none of this. You simply spell back, “Yes, Ma’am. I’ll do my best.” Like an involuntary twitch, you smile at the front of the room. You lift the corners of your mouth. You show off your teeth. Your head tilts to one side and a heavy ringlet of your hair slides forward and settles against your cheek. You have a nice smile, a bit forced perhaps, a beauty pageant smile. You can’t help it. Your mother told you always to smile when addressing persons directly. But in the same instant, you sense this may be the wrong time for smiling. If Teacher were here, she would tell you, “Not now, Helen.” Solemn, you tell yourself. It is a solemn occasion. Show respect. Black shows respect. People in Boston show respect by looking solemn. You pull the corners of your mouth back to level, and close your lips over your teeth. Slowly, solemnly, not in any way that could be construed as fidgety, you raise your hand and lift the stray curl back behind your shoulder. Miss Lawson says, “Mr. Anagnos would like you to tell, in your own words, when the idea for ‘The Frost King’ first came to you.” You say, “It was this past autumn. I wrote it at my home in Tuscumbia, Alabama. Actually, I wrote it at Fern Quarry, about fourteen miles from Tuscumbia, where my family has a summer home. I wrote it as a gift for Mr. Anagnos’s birthday. I wanted to give him . . .” “You,” you think. Should you be addressing him directly? Would that be better, more polite? If Teacher were here, she would tell you. But she is not, so you stick to the way you started. “I wanted to give him a gift to show my appreciation for all he’s done for me, my gratitude for the education I’m receiving here at Perkins.” There is a pause. You know it is a longer pause than it needs to be for Mr. Anagnos to ask another question. They must be talking about something. It occurs to you that these words you have just spoken, appreciation, gratitude, are Teacher’s words. When you finished the story, she wrote these very words in almost the same sentences in a cover letter. Is this what they’re discussing now? Do they have the letter there in front of them? Miss Lawson says, “But the idea, Helen. When did the idea first come to you?” You have no answer for this. Time is tricky. Memory is tricky. You remember deciding to make a gift for Mr. Anagnos. You remember telling


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Teacher. She said you should write a story, “a little story” she said, like the ones you’d written for him before, or for your parents, or for class. So you sat down and wrote, “Once upon a time.” Words followed. You wrote and wrote. You didn’t think what words to put next. They simply came to you somehow. You moved the Braille stylus rapidly across the slate, filling one line, then another. The page filled up. Then there was a pile of pages. Then you wrote “The End,” and it was done. But you can’t remember when the idea came to you, or how. You can’t remember thinking about it, making decisions, weighing options, changing your mind. You say, “I like to write stories that explain things. Like the stories in Greek mythology.” You say this for Mr. Anagnos. He likes Greek mythology, likes anything to do with ancient Greece and Rome. You have often talked together about these things. You go on, “I like those stories because they help me understand things, and remember them. And . . .” you interrupt yourself suddenly, pulling your hand away from Miss Lawson’s as if off a hot stove. You were on the verge of saying, “Teacher was telling me . . .” You know you must leave her out of it. You say, “I had been thinking about the seasons of the year. Autumn. How the leaves change color and fall off the trees.” But it was Teacher who told you this. About the colors. You knew about the falling leaves already. The leaves fell in Tuscumbia, too. You liked to feel them falling. You could stand very still and feel them drifting down around you. You liked to scoop up handfuls of the leaves and bury your face in them. You liked their smell, and the smell of them burning. When the leaves were raked into piles, you would run and jump into them. You loved the shifting feel of them as you landed, the way a gust of wind would make them swirl around you like baby chicks swirling around your hands when you threw the feed. But it was Teacher who told you about the colors. She said that in Alabama, the leaves only turned dull yellow and brown, but in New England, where she came from, they turned many colors. She said when it happens, the forests would become blazing tapestries of color. Those were the words she used. You had to ask her what a tapestry was. Blazing you knew from fire. The leaves were the colors of flame—red, orange, yellow. Hot colors. But you can’t think of this without remembering that it was the first time it had occurred to you that before coming to you, Teacher had come from somewhere else. You knew that Teacher had come. You


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18 Blind Rage

could remember a time when there was no Teacher. But you never thought where Teacher might have been before that. When she talked about New England and the blazing tapestries, it occurred to you that she had been somewhere else, somewhere she might wish to return. But you can’t allow yourself to think about this now. Keep Teacher out of it, you tell yourself. Because thinking about her now makes your throat clench and your eyes sting. You say, “I wanted to write a story to explain why the leaves change color in the fall.” Miss Lawson says, “Do you remember reading a story called ‘The Frost Fairies’? Or someone reading it to you?” “I read it last week,” you say. Did you read it yourself or did Teacher read it to you? Another bead of sweat forms under your arm and slides rapidly down your side. So much has happened in the last week, so many questions, so much confusion. Did someone Braille it for you or was it in Braille already? Or did Teacher spell it into your hand? You flutter the fingers of your free hand, trying to recall the feel of the story, but you cannot. Quick, quick, you’re thinking, because they will know this. If you say the wrong thing, they will have the book there to prove it. Last week was George Washington’s birthday pageant. You played the part of Autumn. The memory makes you wince. You carried a sheaf of grain and a basket of wax fruit, and wore a wreath of autumn leaves in your hair. The night before the pageant, Sunday night, during the dress rehearsal, you were talking to one of the other teachers and said something about Jack Frost. She said, “Who told you about Jack Frost, Helen?” You said that Teacher must have told you. She said, “What else did she say about frost?” You hesitated. You actually drew back from her. There was something in the way she said it which made you afraid. Her fingers spelling against your hand were hard and unfriendly. It was as if her knuckles and fingertips had turned into tiny iron mallets. Her words bruised your palm and you drew away from her. Later, you told Teacher. She did not speak. She did not move. She sat perfectly still. The flesh of her palm seemed to draw back from your fingers. Then she got up and started pacing. “But before last week,” Miss Lawson asks. “Do you remember reading it before last week, or someone reading it to you?”


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“No,” you say. You even make the word with your mouth, but you don’t try to make the sound come out. You have enough on your mind without worrying about that. “No,” you say again. “I cannot remember reading it before. When I read it last week, it seemed familiar to me. It reminded me of my story. But I do not remember reading it before last week.” You pause. There is no human warmth in the air. It quivers. It bristles with energy. But it is not warm. There is no warmth coming from Miss Lawson either. Teacher is always warm. She says she is always cold, but she always feels warm to you. She gives off her warmth but cannot feel it herself. You know she is out there, on the other side of the door, pacing. You press the soles of your shoes hard against the floorboards, hoping to feel the vibrations of her pacing footsteps, but you can’t. You know what her footsteps feel like. And when she paces, the vibrations run right up the bones of your legs to your spine. It’s surprising that such a small body can produce vibrations like that. She is small. You’re only eleven, but you’re almost as tall as she is. When you hug her, you feel all her bones just inside the skin. When you hug yourself, you feel more flesh. But when she paces, it feels almost like a big man carrying a heavy trunk or load of coal. She paces when she is angry. She has been pacing a lot recently. She is pacing now. You are sure of it. But you cannot feel it. And you feel nothing coming from Miss Lawson. You feel nothing coming from the front of the room where you know they are sitting. They are not talking then. They expect more from you. You suck your lower lip between your teeth. Your lip is chapped. There’s a sore spot on the right side because you’ve been biting it. You straighten your lips again. You lift your chin. “I can’t remember reading it before last week, but I know that it happened,” you say. Your mouth twitches—almost a smile. “It’s why we’re here today.” This may be wrong, Helen. This may be me putting words in your mouth, your hands. It’s the sort of thing I’d say. Cut through the pretense. Make them call you a liar, since that’s what they’re there to prove. That’s me—the hostile witness. You, Helen, would be more compliant. You may even believe they want to believe you. And you are always so eager, so hopelessly eager to please. You say, “I know that it happened,” and let it go at that. “When did it happen?” Miss Lawson spells.


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20 Blind Rage

“Three-and-a-half years ago,” you say. “When I was eight. It was summer. It was in Brewster on Cape Cod. At the home of Mrs. Hopkins.” You wonder if Mrs. Hopkins is here. You inhale quickly through your nose but can smell nothing, no one. The room is too cold. Smells don’t travel as well in the cold. Mrs. Hopkins used to be here, you know. She was a teacher here. She was Teacher’s teacher, and her friend. She made Teacher the dress she wore when she first came to you in Tuscumbia. But Mrs. Hopkins is retired now, which means she has gone to live in her house in Brewster. “It was the summer I first came to Boston,” you continue. “The summer I first came to Perkins and first met all of you.” Again your lips twitch. But you stop the smile in time. This is no smiling matter. They may not be pleased to remember when you first came to Perkins. Perhaps what you have done is so bad they wish you’d stayed away. “You know that’s when it happened,” Miss Lawson is spelling into your hand, “but you don’t remember it? How can that be, Helen?” It can be because it is, you think but do not say. Memory is like that. You know you were there. You have been there since. When you go there, you remember being there before. You know certain events took place there, but do you remember the events, or only the telling of the events? What was the question? How do you know but not remember? What a question. It amazes me that you don’t call them on it. You know a lot of things you don’t remember. You know you were born, but you don’t remember that. You know that when you were eighteen months old, you got a fever and that when it passed you were deaf and blind, but you don’t remember that either. Is that in question now too? How are you supposed to know how you know what you know and how you remember what you remember? You’re eleven years old. You should say, “Get serious, people. Are you listening to yourselves?” But that’s not how you operate. You really want to answer this question, really want to prove to them that you acted in good faith, just a little girl wanting to do something nice for the nice man who runs her school, not a ruthlessly calculating plagiarist bent on personal gain and self-promotion. Think, you tell yourself. “Think,” Teacher tells you and taps you on the forehead. “Use your brain.” But that is not how you think of thinking. You know you have a brain in there, and that the brain is where ideas, memories,


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and dreams take place. But to you, it doesn’t feel like the place where you know things. You know things because you touch them. You pick them up. You run your hands over and around them. You know things through your hands, the patch of palm where words are spelled, the soft pads of your fingertips where you feel the dots of Braille. What you know you know as texture and vibration. You feel it in your hands, your chest, the tuning fork of your ribs, the soles of your feet. You taste too, of course. And you smell things. But when you inhale scents through your nose, they go down your throat and feel like tastes. They do not rise into your brain. Miss Lawson touches your arm. You say, “I’m thinking,” then add, “I’m trying to find the right words to explain.” Then you say, “Back then, I didn’t know as many words as I know now. The things I could name were things I could touch. I knew the word for water, but I didn’t know the word for cloud.” You lift your free hand to point overhead, then drop it, not wanting them to think you don’t know there are no clouds indoors. You say, “When people read books to me…” You say “people” because it was not just Teacher. It was your mother. It was Mrs. Hopkins. “When people read to me, I did not always understand every word. I might understand every tenth word. Even when I read to myself in Braille, I did not understand every word. Sometimes I would just skip to the words I knew.” I know how much it costs you to admit this, Helen. You feel shame at your former self ’s ineptitude. You wish you could claim to have known more then. You wish you had always been the superstar student you are now. I know how much it costs you, because I’ve been there myself. When I was eleven, I lost my sight, but I passed as sighted for a long time. I felt ashamed to say “I can’t read that,” or “I can’t see where you’re pointing,” because it made me sound stupid. But this is the price you have to pay, Helen. You have to expose your former self ’s lack of understanding. That’s the whole point. Back then, you didn’t know, didn’t understand. You go on. “Sometimes, after the person” (not just Teacher) “had finished reading to me, I would ask questions, or I would ask them to tell the story to me again. And I didn’t always know for sure if they were reading me the story again or telling it using other words. And other times, someone would tell me a story that might have been from a book or might have been made up right there, out of . . .” your free hand moves in the air, fingering it like


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22 Blind Rage

cloth, whole cloth, thin air, “out of thin air,” you say, “out of imagination. I couldn’t always tell which was which. Now when I read a story on my own, it sometimes seems familiar to me, and I think someone must have read it to me before I fully understood. And sometimes I think it’s because a lot of stories are like a lot of other stories. Like stories in Greek mythology.” Again this is for Mr. Anagnos. You want to remind him of all the conversations you’ve had together, how he always used to praise you, how he called you his special friend. But thinking this makes your lower lip quiver. You suck it between your teeth and clench it. You go on. “I think this is what must have happened with ‘The Frost Fairies.’ I think someone must have read it to me that summer in Brewster. I think parts of the story stayed in my memory. But I cannot remember it happening.” Again there is a pause. You sit very still. You try not to breathe hard. You feel some movement in the air, small ripples you know are speech. At last, Miss Lawson takes your hand and says, “Are you sure this is what happened? Are you sure no one told you to say this?” “Yes. I’m sure. This is what happened,” you say without a pause, because you must keep Teacher out of it. Though of course she did tell you to say this. She paced back and forth across your room, and then sat beside you and told you all this. The words were slightly different, but there are only so many ways to say some things. But you believed her. You always believe her, because it is through her that you know everything you know. Why would you not believe her? Then, on an impulse, you add, “I did not copy that story on purpose. I would never do that. I know that would be wrong.” Because it hurts you that they could think this of you. That he could think this of you—his special friend. It occurs to you suddenly that you have no way of knowing whether Miss Lawson is really repeating what you’re saying. Her hands are so tentative, her spelling so slow. Maybe she’s merely paraphrasing, giving the gist. Who is this Lawson woman anyway? You pull your hand away from her and spell into the air. Then you stop. You spell in the air to Teacher sometimes, but you are not sure this is universally understood. You do not know if they are even looking at you. For all you know, they have turned their backs. You had originally thought that you would try to speak aloud here today. You practice speaking aloud every day, and when you do it, people praise you. But you have learned that your speech is not universally understood.


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And now you cannot trust your lips and tongue and throat and lungs to make any of the patterns of sounds you’ve practiced. Miss Lawson’s fingers are in your palm again. “But are you sure, Helen? Are you sure Miss Sullivan did not tell you to say this?” “I am sure.” You are determined to keep Teacher out of it. “No one told me to say this.” She says, “Are you absolutely sure that when you wrote ‘The Frost King,’ you thought it was your own invention, your own original idea?” She says, “Did Miss Sullivan tell you to write that story? Did Miss Sullivan tell you that story and tell you to write it down?” She says, “Do you remember, or are you just saying what Miss Sullivan told you to say?” “Asked and answered,” I want to say. “You’re just badgering the witness now.” I would be stalling for time, hoping to give you a minute or two to collect yourself. Because I don’t know about you Helen, but this is all getting a bit too fast and furious for me. I can barely keep typing. My hands are cold. I’m actually shivering. You, I can’t tell. You are so busy trying to prove you’re not lying, and trying to keep Teacher out of it, that it seems as if you actually haven’t noticed that the questions have taken an ugly turn. The harder you try to shield Teacher from blame, the more central she becomes. And when that happens, what about you? You become beside the point, and that scares me. Granted, I have the advantage of a hundredplus years of hindsight and a more cynical nature than yours, but even so, Helen, even so. So give me a minute and I’ll get back to you. Afternoon Let’s backtrack. Plagiarism. What does plagiarism mean to an elevenyear-old child? It means copying. Copying is bad. When you copy another child’s test paper (not that you could do this, Helen), it’s bad. But sometimes copying is alright. When I was seven years old, I wrote a story that closely resembled Black Beauty. Naturally, there were differences. My version was written in the vocabulary of a seven-year-old, and it included a lot of crayon drawings. But the idea was identical. No one accused me of plagiarism. Quite the contrary.


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24 Blind Rage

They praised me. Everyone thought it was great—so creative—when in fact, I had created nothing original. And I knew it. I thought it was something I was supposed to do. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and all that. But also, children learn by copying. Copying is encouraged in certain pedagogical contexts. I’m in the office at the moment and could pull seven or eight college English textbooks off my shelf, which contain sample essays for students to imitate. If you weren’t so busy with other things, I could scan one into the computer so you could read it for yourself. Of course, the authors of those books assume college students understand that they are supposed to emulate the form of the samples, not the content. In fact, that’s how you were educated. You were taught, if not to copy, at least to compare. Teacher would give you a topic to write about. Then she’d compare your composition with ones in books or magazines. She’d say, “In the book, everything has a color. You need to say what color the dog is, Helen. You need to say it’s a brown dog.” Then she’d read you a sentence from your composition and a sentence from the book. You’d balance a sentence in each hand, weighing the words. Then she’d say, “You could call it a chocolate brown dog. That would suggest it was a likable dog, a sweettempered dog.” At first, Teacher had to tell you when and where to make these additions. Later, you developed a real knack for it. When you learned that Mr. Anagnos liked everything about ancient Greece and Rome, you wrote a series of compositions. You wrote about how the marble columns of the Parthenon were “brilliant white.” You’d learned that brilliant also means very intelligent, very bright. Inventors like your friend Dr. Bell are brilliant, people say. You think it’s fitting that the Parthenon should be associated with intelligence. You wrote that Rome was “bathed in honeyed sunlight.” You know that sunlight sometimes feels like a warm bath, only dry, and that it is usually some shade of yellow or gold. You like the idea that if sunlight had a taste, it would taste like honey. Everyone praised these compositions. Mr. Anagnos said your language was like poetry. But where did they think you got that language? You have never been to those places. How did you know all those things? How did you know to put these words to those things? From books you’d read and things people told you. How else?


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But it wasn’t like that with “The Frost King.” There was none of that labored, associative thought process. You didn’t have to tell yourself, “Add a color here. Put a sound there.” It all just happened. You went into a kind of creative trance, and when you came out of it, there was the story all done. You’d like to explain this to them. You thought it was the ultimate goal, to achieve such fluency with the language that a whole story could flow from your head, down your arm onto the page. But Miss Lawson is saying, “How can you know something happened and not remember it unless Miss Sullivan told you it happened?” It’s not right, Helen. It’s just not right. They’re not asking you about plagiarism any more. They’re asking you to explain how your mind works, and I don’t think that’s something a child of eleven should be expected to know. But because you are a child of eleven, you are oblivious to this. You think they’re still accusing you of lying, accusing Teacher of lying. So you’re arguing at cross-purposes, getting nowhere. But they’re adults and should know better. I try to imagine them sitting there shoulder-to-shoulder, coming up with such questions. I try to imagine him, Mr. Anagnos, your special friend. There he sits at the center of the long tribunal table, Director of the Perkins Institution, the man in charge. The only man present, in fact. He is a distinguished-looking man. He is mostly bald, and his full beard is carefully trimmed, cut square around the chin. His correct, somber suit is conservatively tailored. His linen is immaculate. His hands are immaculate. His bearing is at once aristocratic and kindly. He cannot like what’s happening here today. “It isn’t right,” he thinks to himself. He is an educated and humane man. Why else would he have taken this position at this institution? Some might point out that his coming here when he did allowed him to leave his native Greece at a time of great turmoil. But he is still a humane, compassionate man. He sighs. He feels the tension around him, the eight teachers who sit at the table on either side of him. He knows which are neutral in their opinion of this matter, which for you and which against. Not that any of them is really against you. You’re only a child, after all. The antagonism is all directed at Teacher. They all remember her from when she was a pupil here. They know how she is, know her willfulness and her ambition. Some would like to see her taken down a notch. Some bear grudges. And with


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26 Blind Rage

just cause, Mr. Anagnos would readily admit. She was a handful, a spitfire, as he always thought of her. She was quick, quick-witted, quick-tempered, also headstrong and occasionally disrespectful. Once an exasperated mathematics teacher asked her, “Is your brain ever awake, Miss Sullivan?” and she replied, “Yes, when I leave your classroom.” Mr. Anagnos finds the corners of his mouth curling upward. He lifts his hand to his mouth and coughs to cover this. He was always having to deal with such shows of insubordination. More than once, he’d been obliged to threaten her with expulsion and other forms of discipline. But in spite of that, he always liked Teacher. He admired her spirit even when it got in his own way. He never forgot how she first came to Perkins at the age of fourteen, blind, orphaned, destitute, rescued from the almshouse at Tewksbury by one of the Institution’s benefactors. It made him lenient and protective. When he chose her to go to Tuscumbia and be your Teacher, others objected. Some complained that her own education was too inadequate to qualify her. Others even alleged she received special consideration only because she was so exceptionally pretty. Jealousy makes people say such things, Mr. Anagnos knows. He chose Teacher because he hoped it would make her settle down, give her a purpose in life. And it did. She settled into a zealot’s monomania. She has become so prickly when it comes to you, Helen, so protective. She cannot tolerate the least question about her methods. She is so young, so excitable. And she has a tendency to exaggerate, stretch the truth. Those first letters she wrote about you from Tuscumbia seemed so implausible. Though she was using methods developed here at Perkins, no one could quite believe the rate of success she claimed to be having with you. “Moderation, Miss Sullivan,” he wrote more than once. “Moderate your claims. Moderate your expectations. The child’s progress may level off.” But when he saw you for himself, he could see how easy it was to be caught up in her enthusiasm. Success has gone to her head, Mr. Anagnos would have to say. She finds it too easy to take full credit for your education. And there’s something else. He glances at the door and pictures her out there in the hall, pacing to and fro, hugging herself for warmth and blowing on her hands. Her face has changed dramatically these last four years, he’s observed. Her eyes seem to have receded into their deep sockets. This may be a residual effect of her trachoma and the surgeries that cured it. But it makes her look at once haggard and ecstatic, like the martyred saints in icons. She is tireless


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when it comes to you, unrelenting. More than once Mr. Anagnos has had to caution her about working you too hard. “A child needs recreation, too,” he’s reminded her, “an occasional outing, a day of rest.” He sighs. There are those present who have lost all patience with Teacher, and are willing to believe the worst about her. Mr. Anagnos shifts in his chair. He is uncomfortable with this. He is uncomfortably cold. He feels the cold in his joints. The older he gets, the longer these Boston winters seem to him. It is when he most longs for the warmth and sunshine of his homeland. He looks at you, seated there on your hard chair. He likes you. He even admires you, to the extent that a grown man can be said to admire a little girl. You are sitting perfectly still now. Your posture is very correct, he notices. Your clothes too. Your navy blue dress with its crisp collar and cuffs and the ruffle around the yoke is very becoming and entirely suitable. He likes blind people, having lived and worked among them for so many years, blind children, especially blind girls. They have a certain quality. He likes to see them walking the hallways in little groups, a line of three or four girls, trailing their hands along the wall to guide them. They seem so dainty and graceful, like little dancers. There’s something ethereal and otherworldly about them. They can be quite pretty, perhaps because they are so guileless and unaffected. He enjoys complimenting them. He’ll meet a group of two or three in the hallway and say, “Don’t you look lovely today!” And they’ll curtsy and giggle behind their hands, pleased to have pleased him, but utterly without pride or vanity. He looks at you. You are different. You draw attention. There’s something elemental about it. It’s as if you radiate energy that magnetically attracts the eye. A stranger walking into a room full of children would instantly point at you and say, “Who is that little girl?” “This is the celebrated Miss Helen Keller,” Mr. Anagnos always says. And you hold out your hand and drop a curtsy as you’ve been taught. You smile, lifting your face to show off your pretty teeth, tilting your head so your hair moves onto your shoulders in a soft mound of curls. You are a delightful child, so cheerful, so pleasing. You demonstrate the finger alphabet. You demonstrate how you can read lips. Mr. Anagnos has let you touch his own lips and throat in many such demonstrations. You always tell him how his whiskers tickle. He feels your strong, eager hands on his face now. He lifts a hand to stroke his beard as if expecting to find your fingers there.


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28 Blind Rage

He has watched how people are around you. He has seen grown men’s faces transformed by wonder to see you do these things. He has learned to count on you. The most stolid benefactor can melt in your presence, and instantly double, even triple, the amount of his donation. There’s no denying that you’re good for business. Perkins has benefited from your presence here, and not just financially. Now it has the reputation as the finest, most pedagogically advanced institution of its kind in the world, surpassing even the school in Paris. You, Helen, have a lot to do with this reputation. Mr. Anagnos has told your miraculous story countless times, because people cannot get enough of you. In fact, that’s the reason he published “The Frost King.” He’d been a bit pressed, so rather than taking the time to write a list of your recent accomplishments as he usually did, he decided simply to reprint your story so the board of directors and other readers would have a concrete example of your ongoing progress. How he regrets this now. He looks at you there across the room. People are drawn to you. The light is drawn to you. It’s not that you are an exceptionally pretty child. By today’s standards, you’d be considered a little chunky. But by the standards of your own day, you’re considered robust and healthy. You’re large for your age. Your abundant hair frames your face and shoulders. You have a fine, fair complexion. Your pale blue eyes are open, because you, like most blind children, have been taught always to keep your eyes open. Your left eye protrudes slightly. This is the only visible sign of your blindness, and it’s hardly noticeable. Your eyes seem to be focused on a spot on the floor between your table and his. Not quite focused, though. You’re not really looking at anything there. It’s as if you’re remembering something, summoning an almost forgotten image. At the same time, you look alert, waiting for something, as if you heard a sound somewhere and are waiting to hear it again. He blinks twice, but when he looks again, the impression is as strong as ever. You look for all the world as if you are thinking. As if, Helen. As if. He shakes his head to clear the fancy. Surely you are not thinking in the same sense that he is thinking. He is uncertain. He is of several minds about you. You challenge his imagination, Helen. His reason rebels. Before you, no one ever had to deal with these issues. You are only the second deaf-blind person he’s ever met. The first was Laura Bridgeman, the first deaf-blind child to learn to communicate with the finger alphabet. She was the protégée of Perkins’s founder, Samuel Gridley Howe, Mr. Anagnos’s


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late, illustrious father-in-law. But communication for her meant something more modest. She learned to communicate basic needs, basic preferences. “May I please have sugar in my tea?” was the sort of thing she could say. She’s dead now. She died three years ago here at Perkins, in the secluded room where she had lived since childhood. She spent her days at needlework. Blind females are often very deft with the needle. Once, people had paid high prices for a piece of her lace. She read a verse or two from the Bible each day. At five o’clock, she had a dish of porridge or thin soup. That was her life, and she seemed content with it—a content, modest, rather pious woman. Mr. Anagnos enjoyed visiting her once or twice a week. She was a soothing presence. Not like you, Helen. You unsettle the mind. He has stood over you watching you type and more than once has had the unsettling impression that the words appearing one by one on the page are somehow connected to thoughts as they form inside your head, when he knows it is really a matter of rote memorization and retrieval. You have a prodigious memory, startling recall. Still, it’s something like watching the performance of a skillful magician. He cannot believe his eyes. He knows he must not believe his eyes. And yet . . . Then other times, he’s had long conversations with you about abstract subjects, classical philosophy, theology. It’s hard to call them conversations. He is not particularly adept at the manual alphabet. But when he’s found the patience for it, he’s marveled at your ability to ask and answer questions, to refine opinions, to construct arguments. He has actually felt himself communing with a mind as powerful and supple as a grown man’s. He thinks, “Perhaps this will chasten her,” meaning Teacher, but maybe also meaning you. Then he thinks, “This is wrong. It is wrong to subject a child to such questions.” But it doesn’t matter what he thinks. Because he published your story, this has become a public matter now. Everyone—the board of directors, the benefactors, the general public—will be watching to see how he handles it. Can he really be so gullible, they are asking themselves, to believe that a child like you, stone deaf, stone blind, could produce something with such whimsy, such poetry and color? It is easy for them to think the worst of him. He has been here long enough to consider himself an American. He associates with only the best people, the best families, educated and compassionate men


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30 Blind Rage

like himself, men who value his cultivation, appreciate the fact that he can recite Homer in the original. Still, he is not one of them. His acceptance in their world is only provisional. He knows that the slightest deviation from correctness in dress, manner, or speech will drop him in their estimation. Or rather it will only confirm what they have always thought, but never said aloud. He has lived in their world long enough to sense the words at the back of their minds. One snowy night, a man coming out of a tavern bumped into him in the street. The man was clearly a laborer of some sort, clearly inebriated. He had to cling to Mr. Anagnos’s shoulders to steady himself. Mr. Anagnos could still remember the way the man’s hands stood out in contrast to the fine, somber stuff of his own overcoat. They were hands roughened by labor, the knuckles bulbous, the nails ragged and discolored. The skin was chapped and red, with a sprinkling of coarse orange hairs. The man’s clothes were patched and worn. The skin of his face was ruddy from drink and smeared with orange-brown freckles. His nose appeared to have been broken more than once, a misshapen lump in the middle of his face. The man peered unsteadily at Mr. Anagnos. His eyes drifted sluggishly from his hat, to his well-groomed beard, to his immaculate collar just visible above his muffler. The man’s lips were twisted into a lopsided grin, as if he was about to make a good-natured joke at his own expense, then clap Mr. Anagnos on the shoulder and part as friends. But then the man’s vision seemed to clear. He stared into Mr. Anagnos’s eyes. The man’s eyes were a watery blue, framed by pale lashes. Then the lids squeezed together, and his eyes became sharp slits of icy color. The man said, “Dirty wop,” and flung Mr. Anagnos aside with such force that he stumbled off the curb into the rushing gutter. Mr. Anagnos lifts his hand. He flicks the air as if shooing a fly. He says, “Go ahead, Miss Lawson. Ask the next question.”

February 8 or 9

Helen, It’s late. I don’t know what time. I don’t want to know. A question woke me. And now that I feel—excuse the expression—that I have your ear, I’d like to ask you. But I can’t. It is very quiet—a still night and late enough that there are no cars passing, no barking dogs. There is a slight hum from the computer. And when I


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type, there is the soft clicking of the keys. But when I stop, there is nothing. Or as close to nothing as I can make it. And it is dark. You see, Helen, I can see something. I perceive light and color, form in a vague way, and motion in fits and starts. I know not to trust what I see, not to depend on it, not even to call it seeing. You saw less than this. You described your blindness as “a white darkness,” which could mean you had some light perception, but maybe it was just a figure of speech. In any case, I can tell the difference between light and dark, and right now, I find the dark soothing. I turn down the brightness on my computer screen so it emits no light at all. But all this is beside the point. I’m stalling for time. I’m trying to slow down my heartbeat, to put a drag on my racing brain. I empty my senses, but my brain is full. This question woke me, and nothing I can do will shake it. So here it is. Here’s what I’ve come to ask. Were you a hoax, Helen? A fake? There, I’ve typed the words. Forgive me, Helen. It’s a betrayal, I know. My stomach feels tight and slimy. My flesh is pulling back from my skin. But I really need to know. Because as I’m sure you’ve thought from time to time, maybe every hour of every day, it’s what they think. Them—the ablebodied, the hearing and seeing majority, the Normals, as some of us like to call them today. They may play lip service to your achievements, may laud all you accomplished, hold you up as an example to children: “Why can’t you be more like Helen Keller?” But behind all those words there’s a doubt. Maybe you were a hoax, a fake, a fraud. Yes, Teacher tamed you. She cleaned you up and made you docile. She taught you how to shake hands and smile for cameras. She taught you to make your little hand gestures, and to mumble on cue. But who’s to say you were really saying what she said you were? Sure, occasionally you met someone who actually knew the finger alphabet. But those were generally formal situations. Teacher could have taught you a repertoire of a couple dozen useful phrases, which she could then prompt you to use. “Number three,” she’d tap on your shoulder. And you’d sign, “So lovely to meet you.” Or “Number twenty-two,” she’d signal. And you’d say, “I hope your mother is in good health.” Or worse. Here’s the nightmare image. Yes, image, because my dreams have visual elements. In this dream, this nightmare, I see a body. Usually when I see human bodies, they are elongated, wispy, with wavy outlines,


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32 Blind Rage

like bodies underwater. But this body is thicker and more substantial, stolid and weighty. Its head is squareish and sits on its shoulders with no neck. Or the head may be bowed, lolling forward. I have next to no depth perception, so I can’t tell for sure. The body is wearing a dress too small for it. Ill-fitting, I should say. Too tight in some places, too baggy in others. It’s hard to say that any size dress could fit this body. It is a little girl’s dress, blue, in a nineteenth-century style. I say this because it has a ruffle around the yoke. At least I think that’s what it is. To know for sure, I’d have to touch it, and there is no way I’m going to touch that body. Its arms are too long for the sleeves. The arms hang down below the cuffs and turn into hands or paws—it’s hard to tell. The exposed arms are thick, with no taper at the wrist. This is what I see. What I sense is that this body is dressed up to look like something it’s not. I sense a conspiracy to commit this pretense, to perpetrate a joke, mostly at the body’s expense. And the masquerade makes it grotesque, ludicrous, like a cat wearing baby clothes. Then the body moves. It shuffles forward on unnaturally small, sliding steps. It lifts one arm, limp-wristed, pinky raised. (So it has fingers.) Then the whole body bobs down and up abruptly. It’s doing a curtsy. The daintiness of these movements makes it seem all the more hulking and ungainly. It performs these movements over and over again, every time the same. It is practicing, repeating something it has been trained to do. Something in the sameness of each repetition tells me the training was not gentle. It has been trained to do these things as part of the joke, the big deception, which fools no one. The body has a voice, Helen. I’ve heard it. This is memory, not nightmare. I am sitting in the kitchen listening to the radio. My mother is cooking something, and I am at the table, coloring with crayons. I am maybe six years old, and not blind yet. The first voice on the radio belongs to President John F. Kennedy. He is speaking words of praise about someone. I don’t understand every word he says, but I get the gist. He’s talking about the person’s intelligence, dedication, and perseverance. He calls the person a role model, an example, an inspiration. Then another voice comes on and it shocks me. It is the voice that summons the nightmare. It is thick and ungainly. The voice is too much in the mouth with no resonance from the throat and chest. The voice is parsed out in units like words, but the words


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are incomprehensible. The sounds belong to English, but they are wrong, skewed, off-kilter. It makes d’s instead of t’s, w’s instead of r’s. I struggle to understand it. With effort, I make out the words: “Dank yoo-oo, Mithda Pwethidenn.” The voice is uncanny. It’s like someone speaking underwater. It’s like an adult baby-talking through a pillow. I am shocked, distressed, indignant even, because there is no way that voice deserves the words of praise the president spoke or the applause now thundering out of the radio. I feel they’re all, even the president, engaged in a shameful pretense, a sick joke at the expense of someone or something that cannot defend itself or know what is going on. I feel I am the only soul on earth who recognizes that the emperor has no clothes. This is cruel, I know, Helen. The lowest of low blows. I wince to think what my friends who are Deaf would say. It’s more than a betrayal. It’s brutal, obscene. But I feel a need to say it, to confess. I type in fits and starts. And maybe I’ll delete it all without reading it. But the thing is, Helen, as you and I both know, it’s what the Normals think. Behind every “How ever do you manage?” there’s the thought, “Someone is doing this for her. Yes, she goes through the motions. She can do as she’s told. But inside that head, behind those blind eyes, those deaf ears, there’s nobody home.” You see what you’ve done to me, the point you’ve brought me to? I have to put my worst fear out there before we can go any farther. I say “we,” when of course I mean only me. Only me and this idea of you I manipulate and control. And I say “farther” when I have no idea how much farther I can go, where this speculation can lead me. And yet, there’s something I need to know here, something I need to believe. I hit Save. Save me, Helen. Let me get beyond this. February 9 Forget I asked. February 10 But since I have asked, let me explain myself. It’s the doubt, Helen. You know about the doubt. It’s that nagging unease at the back of your mind whenever anything good happens. You’re in school and you wonder, “Is the


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34 Blind Rage

A on this paper a gift? Would a Normal student get an A for this?” You get a job, but you wonder, “Do they really think I’m qualified or is this just some sort of affirmative action quota?” That’s how I think when anything good happens. You can imagine how I get on bad days. For instance, the other day I was arguing with a student about the grade on his paper, and it occurred to me that he’s thinking, “This woman is blind. How can she possibly judge me, my work?” And then I wondered, if he takes his complaint to another professor or to my chair, will that person say, “Well, you know how it is, son. People like that have to be tougher than normal people. It’s overcompensation. I know it’s annoying, but you can put up with it. Noblesse oblige.” Of course you know about the doubt. The plagiarism case seems to have been the precise moment in your life when the doubt first took hold. Because you must have understood that they never would have done it to a Normal child. If you’d been a Normal child, they would have said, “So someone read you the story, and you remember the story but don’t remember the person reading it to you. OK. I can see how that could happen. Sounds reasonable to me.” But because it was you, and because seeing and hearing had nothing to do with your experience of the world, they couldn’t let it go at that. The doubt stayed with you from then on, with you, around you, in you. No one ever put you on trial for plagiarism again, but the issue still came up. Reviewers of your books always commented when you used a visual or auditory detail, when all you were trying to do was write according to the rules and conventions of their written language. You were an adult by this time and could shrug it off in a way. Everybody gets stupid reviews. But you and I know you were shrugging off more than that. In a way, you brought it on yourself, Helen. Because you kept denying that Teacher had anything to do with “The Frost King,” it made them doubt you all the more. When the puppet proclaims it has no strings, everybody starts searching for the puppeteer. Face it, Helen. They may not say it out loud, but somewhere down deep they believe we are not quite human. Every time they repeated the question “How do you know what you know and remember what you remember?” they shoved you away from themselves. They drew a line in the sand and said, “You don’t belong to the same species. Being human means seeing and hearing.” Because we lack one or both of these elite senses, they assume our


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brains are understimulated, underdeveloped, full of holes. Our reality is by definition muted, distanced, indistinct. On top of that, they believe that imagination is primarily visual. While they can imagine something they have never actually seen, they do not believe we can. I think I’m on to something, Helen, but I have a class to teach. Let me think some more and get back to you. February 11 Helen, I’ve worked my way through this, and I think I have it figured out. I’m talking about the “Frost King” incident. Here’s why I believe you: because your description of the way your brain worked rings true to me. In order to explain, let me remind you of the story itself. Once upon a time, it began, there was a king called King Frost. Like most kings, King Frost possessed vast stores of gems and precious metals. Unlike many kings, however, he wished to share his wealth with his subjects. Hoping to distribute his riches in an equitable manner, he decided to consult his neighbor to the north, Santa Claus. He sent a legion of fairies carrying jars of gems and gold and copper coins through the forest separating the two kingdoms. But in the forest, the fairies became distracted. They deposited their burden in the branches of trees while they hunted for nuts and berries and frolicked with the woodland creatures. King Frost’s old enemy King Sun saw the glittering treasure in the trees and, being greedy, wanted to take it for his own. But the heat of his fiery hands melted the jewels and coins, and they dripped and congealed over the leaves of the trees. When King Frost learned what had happened, he was very angry with the fairies for their negligence. But when he saw the beautiful colors on the leaves, he relented. He understood that this was a better way to share his wealth with his subjects. From then on, every autumn, King Frost and King Sun combined forces. They would melt down a portion of King Frost’s treasure, and the fairies would paint the brilliant colors on the leaves of all the trees. So that’s the story. Someone read it to you in the summer of 1888, and your subconscious swallowed it whole, without fully digesting it word by word. So why was it that this story came back to you in its entirety three years later? There are two reasons, as I understand it, two elements of the story which made your brain first latch onto it, then later release it.


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36 Blind Rage

The first element is color. Like most blind people, you’re interested in color. Perhaps you have some memory of color from your first eighteen months of sight, perhaps not. But you like to think about color. You always ask what color things are, and what different colors connote. Dresses, for instance. You cannot tell the color by touching, but once you know the color, you connect it with something you can feel in the cloth, or the way it fits, or how the sleeves are. You can go to your wardrobe and distinguish your dark blue dress from the light blue one. The dark blue is wool with a starched collar and cuffs. The light blue is muslin and has smocking around the bodice. The dark blue is called navy because it’s the color sailors wear. The other dress is sky blue, because it’s the color of sky. You like it when colors have things attached to them: sky blue, grass green, ruby red. You revel in these associations. You also think of colors in terms of temperatures—flame red, sun yellow—textures and smells. Green is silky cool like grass on your bare feet in the summertime, and it smells like pine needles after rain, pungent and thrilling. Blue is colder, like water. Except you know water actually has no color. It is transparent. It reflects the colors around it. It reflects the blue sky. Still, you associate blue and water and cold. Lips turn blue in the cold, Teacher says. She does not say which shade of blue. Frost blue? Flowers help, too. Roses are red, violets blue. You wish there were more rhymes like that. Not that this one is entirely accurate. Why aren’t violets violet? Violet is soft as velvet, softer even, with a longer nap, a frail fuzz, soft as down. Violet smells like violets, or like wild grapes—a dusty tang on your tongue. Not like blue at all. And roses are not always red. One day, you discovered that the petals of white roses feel thinner, less substantial than the petals of red roses. You announced this and everyone got excited. “You can feel colors, Helen?” But you couldn’t do it with silk scarves or wooden blocks or sheets of paper. Only roses. Teacher said, “Don’t do tricks just to impress people,” which made you feel ashamed. Because she used to be blind, she knows all the tricks. She was on to you, but kept it to herself. Color. It’s the one aspect of the visible world you think you’d like to experience. As I’ve mentioned, I can perceive color, and let me tell you, it’s worth it. Sometimes I am stopped in my tracks by the color of a flower, or a plastic toy in someone’s yard, or a car in a parking lot. I can change the color of my computer screen. At the moment, it’s purple, but I can change


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it to turquoise or orange or blue. I can sit staring at the screen for hours, my brain a blank. It’s almost physical, almost a sensation, washing over me in waves. Waves. You understand waves, wavelengths of light. That’s what color is, different wavelengths of light. Would you know that in 1892? But you understand about sound waves, about vibrations. You slap your hand through the surface of the water in the bathtub and feel the waves lapping against your body, and understand that sound is like that somehow. Someone slams the door and you feel it in your rib cage as a vibration. You press your hand against the windowpane and feel the clap of thunder. The thunder slaps the still surface of the air and makes waves that ripple and radiate outward and slap against the windowpane. Waves. Wavelengths. Wave frequencies. Radiation. So that’s one thing—color. Then there’s the other thing—the mutability of matter, thermodynamics. The changes that take place in matter when the temperature changes. Because that’s how it all got started. Frost. You asked Teacher what frost was. She talked a lot about it. Jack Frost. A frosty morning. She said it looked like lace on the window. But when you touched the window, you only felt the cold, and a thin grainy film you could scrape off with your finger. But it left no trace under your nail. No taste either, though you had to do this when Teacher was not looking. You like the idea though—lace. You like lace, especially when there’s a discernible pattern in it, floral shapes or birds. Your mother showed you how to tat once, but you never had the patience for it. She said the finest lace causes the women who make it to go blind. You know this is supposed to make you sad, but somehow it doesn’t. So frost is like lace, Teacher tells you. Who went blind making it? you wonder, but don’t ask. She says it’s like the dew, but that when the air is cold it turns solid, like ice. Only thinner, finer, its surface pierced by patterns. You know about dew. In the summer when you walk through the fields behind the house, the dew makes the hem of your dress heavy and wringing wet. Teacher told you how dew looks beaded on the petals of different flowers, how when the sunlight shines on it the flowers sparkle like they’ve been dipped in liquid diamonds. Melted gems. Where did the idea come from? And you understand about freezing. Even back home in Alabama, things freeze in winter. You know what it feels like when the ground becomes


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38 Blind Rage

unyielding underfoot, as hard as paving stones. And you know how the grass gets dry and coarse, rigid as little needles piercing the soles of your shoes. You know that winter is different up here in New England. There’s snow for one thing. Ice, sleet, slush. All these things you’ve felt, held in your hand, tasted even, smelled coming, smelled on people’s clothes when they come in from it. But frost? So one morning, Teacher woke you and bundled you into clothes and bustled you outside into the cold. It was cold enough to make your lungs ache. And she made you stoop down there in the garden and said, “Here. Touch the frost.” And she guided your hand down to a low yew where you did feel something hanging on the spiky branches. You felt the slimmest sprinkling of a texture that clung to your fingertip, then vanished, leaving only the barest trace of moisture behind. “Where is it?” you asked. “Where did it go?” She explained to you that it melted, that the heat of your hand made it return to its liquid state. You understand this. You’ve held your mouth open to catch snowflakes on your tongue, and felt how the hard pellets of sleet hit your cheeks then run down in tracks like tears. You have held your hand over the spout of the boiling tea kettle and felt the steam condense against your palm. First it is warm and downy, then slick, then dripping wet. Your hand is colder than steam but hotter than frost. You wish the frost were more durable. You’d like it to be a brittle lacy wafer you can pick up and hold by its edges. You try again, but again the grainy texture fades almost as soon as you touch it. You hold your hand in the air high above your head until the skin starts to tingle. You want to make your skin colder so you can hold the frost a little longer. But you only make your fingers numb. When you touch the branch again, you feel nothing. Teacher laughs at you. She lifts your numb hand to her face to feel the small, hot gusts of her laughter. Then she makes you put your mitten back on. When was that, you wonder now. You know it was a while ago. Autumn? Frost happens in autumn, not winter. But was it this year or last year? It feels like it could have been this morning. Memory. Memory plays tricks, Teacher says. Memory is still a tricky concept. These sensations are still with you, on your fingers, your face. Your body feels the bundled warmth of your coat and muffler and hat. But if you were to touch yourself, you would discover you are wearing only the starched dress and the wellpolished shoes. And you are sitting on a hard chair in a cold room attempting to explain your consciousness to people who have doubts about you.


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But to me, it’s all perfectly clear. Someone read you that story, and you latched onto the words you knew, the words you liked. You knew the words for colors, and made the connection between colors and temperature. Flame red. Sun yellow. But also ruby red. Golden yellow. And you knew the words for hot and cold. You knew that heat melts things, and cold freezes them. Frost is frozen dew. Dew is like melted diamonds. Your hot hands melt the frost and turn it liquid, quick as quicksilver, silver drops slither down the stems of leaves, dripping silver, dripping gold. An alchemy of temperature change. Autumn leaves happen when it’s cold at night and hot in the day. Autumn leaves look like melted rubies, melted gold, the colors of flame frozen by frosty nights. You retained something about fairies, something about kings, because every story anyone reads you seems to have some or both of these. And something about Santa Claus. Gifts in a cold season. You retained these parts until you had the language to turn it all into a story, to reconstruct the story someone read to you. Miss Lawson is saying, “You claim someone read the story to you the summer of 1888, at Mrs. Hopkins’s home at Brewster, but you don’t remember who read it or what time of day it was, or anything else about the event. How can you know that’s what happened and not remember it happening?” I wish you’d take off a shoe and throw it at them, Helen. What a question! You can’t remember it happening because that summer was such a jumble of new sensations and new words, and it was all you could do to stay standing. Every day, you were bombarded by hundreds of new words. You crammed them all into the pockets and recesses of your brain in the hope that some time in the future you’d know what to do with them all. And it wasn’t just words that summer. It was new people, new animals, new places. It was the first time you met the ocean. You remember that. You remember because Teacher and your mother always tell a story about it. In the story, you ran down the beach straight toward the ocean, as if you knew exactly where it was. Then you waded right in, squealing with delight as the water rushed up around your calves. You stooped down to pat the frothy surface of the water as it swirled away. Then you caught at the moving sand and pebbles swept along with the undertow. And then, as if you were chasing something, you rushed forward, arms reaching, straight toward the breakers, and were knocked down by a wave. But you don’t remember it as being knocked down. You remember it as being picked up. You felt the insistent, irresistible rush of water, sand,


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40 Blind Rage

pebbles underfoot, and felt yourself drawn forward. Then you felt the water rise up like a large dog rearing. And then it curled over you, wrapped around you, and drew you to it, like a hand, a wing, a fin. And you could not be frightened because it was as if you’d always known this feeling. You felt transformed, no longer flesh and bone, but something softer, lighter, more liquid, a jelly, a jellyfish, undulant and serene. You felt yourself tiny, a toy, tossed back and forth, rolled over and over. It was like tumbling down stairs, rolling down a hill, except there were no sharp edges to hit your body, and no sense that you would ever reach the bottom. Then someone came and lifted you out and hauled you back to the dry sand. There was a great commotion—your mother in near hysterics, pressing your hands to her face, Teacher thumping you hard, too hard, on your back. And when you had coughed up all the water, you made them laugh because you spelled water into the air. They laughed because water was your first word. That pump story was already the one everyone told, and it was funny that you could equate the controlled flow of pump water into your hand with the primal force of the sea. You said, “Who put the salt in the water?” and made them laugh more. And since they were laughing you almost got away from them again, almost slipped their grasp as you ran, utterly undaunted, back toward the breakers. Because what they didn’t understand was you were not saying water at all. You were trying to express something much larger and more complex, something about the sensation of being weightless, without weight or form or substance, sustained and buoyed by something without form or substance either, but something that acted with such playful gentleness when it swept you up, up into itself, made you a part of itself again. Again. That’s what you wanted to say. You’d been there before, felt this before. The known thing. Water. Mother. Home. Helen, come back. Pull yourself together. Collect your senses and use them to insert yourself back into your body. The here and now. The room is cold. The chair is hard. Your free hand rests on the tabletop. Through a layer of polish, you feel the wood grain. If your fingernails were not bitten down to the nub, you could scratch words into the waxy surface. That must be why Teacher nags you not to bite them, because you never know when you might need fingernails to inscribe some surface with a message of distress. “Memory is like that,” you would say, except that you’re eleven years old and do not presume to know how memory works. Memory is a mystery,


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even now. The brain absorbs things. Later, they rise to the surface. No one really knows what makes it happen—a sensory trigger, the simple desire to be anywhere but the here and now. And when it happens, it has all the immediacy and sensation of experience. One minute you’re rolling in the surf off the beach at Brewster, and the next minute you’re sitting in a cold room in the Perkins Institution answering questions about—What was the question? Can you trace the provenance of your idea? Can you explain how memory works in a prelinguistic consciousness? It’s enough to make you laugh out loud, if you hadn’t forgotten how. If it were me, Helen, I think I’d sit on my hands and refuse to go on. They’re questioning your humanity, and they don’t have the right. Or else I’d lie. I’d say, “OK. I confess. Guilty as charged. I did it. I felt I wasn’t getting the attention around here I used to get. So I pulled that book off the shelf, copied that story, and sent it in with my name on it.” I’d lie because the punishment for lying could not be worse than this. But you won’t lie, in part because you still feel compelled to tell the truth, and in part because you know they don’t believe you capable of such deceit. They don’t believe you’re capable of understanding, much less explaining, how your brain works, either. They believe you’re repeating a script, an elaborate and multilayered script, but a script all the same. They’re questioning you to make sure you’ll stick to the script, no matter who asks the questions, and under what conditions. Teacher is the one on trial here, not you. They think you’re merely her puppet, a gifted ape, nothing more. So be it, you think. If they’re here to test Teacher’s handiwork, you’ll show them exactly how good a job she’s done with you. Because if Teacher is found guilty of fraud, where will you be? What will become of you without her? And worse than that. What will become of her without you? You’ll make out all right. You could stay on at Perkins or go to another school. You’d survive somehow. But Teacher? She certainly wouldn’t get another teaching post after this. And she doesn’t have the training or constitution to do much else. You hate to criticize her, but she’s a little too arrogant, a little too aggressive for the types of jobs that would be available. The Boston of 1892 is not a hospitable place for yet another child of Irish immigrants with a patchy education and a bad attitude. So you have reasons to keep on with this. Also, you’re becoming aware that Miss Lawson’s energy is starting to wane. She made three spelling errors in the last two sentences. You didn’t mention it because you’re being


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polite. But you noticed. They’re all getting tired. They keep asking the same question over and over, and you keep answering. You’re eleven years old. While your tender age makes these proceedings an atrocity, it also gives you an advantage. You renew your energy with every breath you take. You could keep at this all day, all night, all day tomorrow. And this is your language. You’re fluent. Words flow down your hand into Miss Lawson’s swollen palm. Your fingers are nimble and accurate. You spell faster. Your fingers and knuckles hit her hand with quick, forceful jabs. Sooner or later she’ll lose it, throw up her hands and say, “I can’t do this anymore. Look at her! This kid will not crack.” The thought makes you smile. You lift your chin. You straighten your spine. You peel your lips off your dry teeth. If they think you’re something less than human, a freakish creation of your Teacher, let them say it to your smiling face. You say, “I am Helen Keller, a fully conscious being, an entity whole, autonomous, and separate from my Teacher.” You say, “I think therefore I am. Also.” You say, “C-o-g-i-t-o-e-r-g-o-s-u-m-.” Not that you would speak precisely these words. But whatever they are, you find words to satisfy them. I’ll let it go at that. Then it’s over. The questions stop. The defense rests. You rest your hands on the table and wait for them to reach their decision. You briefly consider saying “thank you” out loud. “Thanks for what?” I’d like to know. But you can’t trust yourself to make the sounds correctly. You know if you say “dank yoo” instead of “thank you,” you’ll sound stupid. And that’s the last thing you want to do, now that this may well be the last public thing you ever say. Later One more thing, Helen, then I’ll let you go. They finish asking their questions and confer. Though what they have to talk about I can’t say. Then they come back with the news that they exonerate you. They find you not guilty. They clear you of all charges. You don’t know now, but you will learn later, that four of them voted for you and four against. Mr. Anagnos broke the tie. Numbers do not matter to you now. You stand. You push your chair in under the table. You drop a curtsy. You turn and head for the door.


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You feel them surge around you—Mr. Anagnos and the four who voted for you. The other four hold back or leave the room. You will never know. All you know is you passed the test. They are satisfied that if you are a fraud perpetrated by your Teacher, you are at least the best damn fraud the world has ever known. They are reassured that if you are interrogated by outsiders, the fraud will hold up. They embrace you. They shake your hand. They pat you on the head, the back, the arm. Mr. Anagnos’s beard tickles your face, but there is no pleasure in this for you now. They spell congratulations into your hand. You smile. You tilt your head from side to side so your pretty hair falls around your face. You say, “I’m so happy. I’m so grateful you believe me.” You make me cringe saying these things, but I know why you must. It’s a matter of survival, yours and mine. Their bodies are all around you. The warmth they give off is weak, diluted, ungenuine. It makes you want to cringe. But you keep bobbing your head up and down, keep smiling your beauty pageant smile, keep saying, “I’m so glad. I’m so grateful.” And they are too busy congratulating you, congratulating themselves, to notice that your face has the grotesque, plastic immobility of a mask. And you are steadily moving backward, slipping free of their tepid, cloying hands. The air around you is cold, viscous. It is hard to move through it. It clings to you and holds you in place. You feel you are sleepwalking. You feel you are moving through tepid mud. Finally, you take hold of the icy doorknob. You haul the heavy door open and fling yourself at the scent, the heat, the small wiry body you know as Teacher. Everyone is speaking at once. Teacher’s breath moves past your face, and you know she is speaking, laughing. In your hand she spells, “I’m so proud of you. You were so brave. It’s all right, Helen. It’s all over now.” This startles you a little. It makes you draw your hand away. Surely she can’t believe what she’s saying. She must know that though their questions have stopped for now, it is only a temporary respite, a ceasefire. Surely she knows that? For a split second, anger flares. You want to say, “What do you mean, all over? How can you say that after what I’ve been through?” Because you kept her out of it. Whenever they tried to bring her into it, you dodged, you deflected it right back to yourself. “All over?” you want to say. “Don’t you get it? Don’t you know what they did to me in there?” You want to say something, because in spite of everything, you still believe in telling the truth, still


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believe there’s such a thing as the truth. And you believe that sometimes the words need to be spoken, even when there’s no one there to receive them. “Over? Don’t kid yourself, Teacher. This is only the beginning.” But you hesitate. It occurs to you that perhaps she really does not know what you’ve been through, perhaps she doesn’t understand that once they started questioning your humanity, they threw up a barrier between themselves and you that will never come down. And suddenly, you want to protect her from that truth. For you, the world has been irreparably transfigured. For her, this is merely another hurdle she’s helped you overcome. She needs to think that way, and suddenly, you need her to retain that innocence, that faith. So this is where I must leave you, there in a cold passageway with a throng of well-wishers closing in around you. The throng has grown. There are more teachers, other children, all of them speaking at once, touching you, kissing you, spelling into your free hand. Your other hand is in Teacher’s. I feel the heat between your hands. I feel your fingers poised, the words swelling your knuckles, making the bones ache. Let me know what happens. I’ll be here. GK


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part two

Full Body Contact June 20 Dear Helen, It’s been a while since I’ve written. I have no way of knowing for sure, but I sense you’d be happy to keep it that way. But here I am again. And now I’ve got a new topic. We’ve talked about your mind. Now let’s talk about your body. The subject now is sex. Another aspect of the Helen Keller Myth is that you had no sex life. It’s a myth a lot of people work hard to preserve. All your biographers assert it. They say that the reason you were always so prolific and tireless was that you sublimated or repressed your sexuality, and used the excess energy to power your work. They are at such pains to promote the idea that you were innocent, pure, sexless. I’ve read it so often that the mere repetition of it makes it sound ludicrous. I would think it would make you angry, though you expressed the idea yourself a couple of times. But when I read your statements about it, I sense it was one of those things someone told you to say. Why, Helen? Why is the idea of your sexuality so threatening? There are several answers. One comes from the impulse to make you a saint. Since blindness, deafness, and other impairments have traditionally been associated with sin, to make yourself admirable, you had to promote the notion of absolute purity. But there are other issues, and even you must recognize that the price of sainthood is awfully steep. I would argue that every human being has a sex life. The form it takes may vary, but it’s a part of being human. So here’s your chance to finally talk about it. Let’s start from the beginning. Carnal knowledge. How and when did you learn about sex—the difference between little boys and little girls, where babies come from, etc.? Teacher prided herself on answering your every question. She made you something of an amateur naturalist, always 45


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giving you hands-on experience with everything. But when your aunt had a baby and you went to Teacher with the inevitable question, she was a bit stumped. Her own information was sketchy. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say her information was rather too explicit to impart to a child. Let’s not forget she’d spent four formative years at the almshouse at Tewksbury before she went to Perkins. The women there, many of them prostitutes, unwed mothers, and the like, would have been regular fonts of information, ready to share their wisdom and warnings with Annie, the little blind girl. Doubtless, she witnessed births, or heard them, or heard them described. Not to mention descriptions of how the babies got started. Teacher didn’t like to recall those years now that she’d gotten her sight back, gotten an education and a job. Also, it was hard for her to know what to do with the information she had, in the new genteel surroundings of your family’s home. And you were at an age when you repeated every new word she taught you to anyone who came near you. So she took you to sit under a tree in the garden and read you a book about insects. This distracted you—you liked insects—but it seemed off the subject. What did bees and grasshoppers have to do with your new baby cousin? Some time later, she might have named all the parts of your body, being careful to tell you that some of these were words you should not use in public. You promised to keep these new words secret, but since you were on the subject, you might have felt inclined to tell her that sometimes when you touched yourself there (spelling the new word with one hand and pointing with the other) it felt sort of funny but also sort of good. And she told you that those feelings were perfectly natural, perfectly all right to have. But I’m guessing this is a conversation you never had. I can’t assume that both of you were so in advance of your times about everything. More likely, she caught you at it one day, and told you not to do it, but didn’t tell you why. And she told you in a way that was so adamant and so cryptic that you knew not to ask. And what did she tell you about male anatomy? What sort of hands-on experience did she offer about that? Of course, children find these things out without being told. Even before Teacher came and gave everything a name, you knew the difference between male bodies and female ones. Female bodies were softer, rounder, more pliant, while male bodies had sharper angles, harder knuckles, knees, and elbows. Your mother reported that you always preferred gentlemen visitors


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Full Body Contact 47

to ladies. You were happy to let men kiss you but ran away when women tried. So while you sat on those gentlemen’s laps and groped around their pockets, ostensibly searching for candy, you had the opportunity to make other discoveries. You were such a curious child. When you were eight, you wrote a letter to your mother describing a party you attended: “Clifton did not kiss me,” you wrote, “because he does not like to kiss little girls. He is shy. I am very glad that Frank and Clarence and Robbie and Eddie and Charles and George were not very shy.” I don’t know, Helen, this sounds a little boy-crazy to me. Anything else go on with those boys who were not shy? Children conduct their own investigations. Let’s not pretend such things don’t go on, and have always gone on. You led a sheltered life, it’s true, but there were other children around, boys. All sorts of things could have happened. Ever play doctor, Helen? All right, so here’s a possible scenario. You were at home in Alabama, with some boy you knew, a neighbor, or the son of one of your father’s friends. He was probably older than you, curious himself, but with a clearer idea of what he was looking for. And from the boy’s point of view, you made the perfect partner for these explorations because you would necessarily keep your mouth shut about it. So what happened? You and the boy wandered off together. You found some out-of-the-way place, at a distance from the house and adults. Then what? Even without language, even before Teacher came, you had a gift for pantomime. What you wanted from this boy would be comparatively simple to mime. You’d know where to point, and the rest would be obvious. “Show me yours. I’ll show you mine.” But showing meant something different for each of you. You could show him yours from a discreet distance, not even having to see the expression on his face. What that expression would be I couldn’t say, never having seen it myself. Wonder, horror, desire? For all you knew, boys had been looking at you for years. Boys from all over the neighborhood, singly, and, more likely, in groups, could have been sneaking peeks at you doing all sorts of things. You in the bathtub, you in the privy, you undressing for bed. Apparently, there’s some sort of erotic mystique about blind females. You can look at them but they can’t look back. It turns men on, apparently. Don’t ask me. But back to you and this boy. Maybe there’s a different kind of charge when the girl is consciously showing herself. But for him to


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show you his, you would have to touch. If you’d touched him and the thing moved, it would startle and enthrall you. “How’d you do that?” you’d want to know. “Make it do it again.” And once the touching started, there’d be no end to it. Wouldn’t he want to touch back? Wouldn’t you want him to touch you? This is too far-fetched. Time would be a factor. Some adult would notice you were missing and come looking for you. There wouldn’t be enough time for more than a quick peek and grope, which would not satisfy your curiosity. Not yours, Helen. So maybe you didn’t find out until later, at Perkins. It would have been a blind boy then, so the touching was at once more ordinary, because you both relied on it in ways sighted people do not, and more special, because you were both better at it. That’s the erotic folklore about blind men, by the way. Rumor has it, they’re better with their hands. Their fingers are more sensitive, more nimble. I wouldn’t know. I’ve never done it with a blind man. Care to clue me in? Nothing. Well, so I can imagine. One rainy Saturday afternoon, the two of you stole away to a corner in the cellar behind the furnace, or maybe a vacant classroom. You were able to communicate; other children at Perkins knew the finger alphabet even if they weren’t deaf. Certainly you shared at least enough language to say, “Like this? Like this?” Stop your sputtering, Helen, if that’s what you’re doing. We’re all adults here. These are things that happen between boys and girls. It’s human nature. I can accept that it was something you never would have talked about, either because the boy told you not to, or because you’d intuited it somehow. But I do not accept that a girl as curious and eager for experience as you failed to find out what you wanted to know. At least I make an effort to imagine an encounter that was mutually initiated, mutually satisfying. I do this because my fear is that the facts are otherwise. Maybe the reality is that one night, one of those Tuscumbia boys who used to peek at you through your window actually climbed inside. You woke to find a hand over your mouth, a hard weight weighing you down, a rough hand hiking up your nightgown. You were not a passive child and would have tried to fight back. You knew how to deliver a wicked kick, how to bite and scratch. But even so, you were caught off guard. And you had no idea what he wanted to do to you, what it was you were struggling to


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prevent. You were acting out of the pure instinct of self-protection. But he was bigger and stronger than you, and probably angry about something. You felt the anger in his body—an injustice on top of everything, because what had you ever done to him? Him who? You were desperate to know. Or maybe you knew only too well. Why should I assume him to be a stranger? There were plenty of males in your household: your two half-brothers for instance, not to mention your father. You see, I can imagine any horror. And there’s no reason to assume it was only one of them, only once, only one at a time. Or that it stopped when you left Alabama. What about that man Anagnos at Perkins? A man who could try a child for plagiarism is capable of anything. Maybe that explains why you didn’t stay on there even though your name had been cleared of the plagiarism charge. Don’t turn away, Helen. Don’t pretend I’m inventing something out of thin air. Where would I get all this stuff, if not from you? Somewhere in all these scenarios, there’s something close to the truth. And no matter what any of them told you, it was not your fault. The shame is not in the fact that it happened to you. The shame comes from not speaking, keeping their secret for them, keeping the secret shame. So break the silence, Helen. I’m here to receive your story, not to judge you. GK June 25 Helen, OK. I understand your silence. Why harp on the things you can’t change? And you may not even have the language for it. In your early life, it was often hard to separate reality from dream or nightmare. If no one gave you the words or the opportunity to describe whatever early sexual experiences you had, the problem was compounded. So whatever events may have taken place could have stayed in that shadowy, unreal region, detached by a sharp delineation from regular life. Besides, I have to leave open the possibility that none of what I can imagine ever happened to you. Anything is possible. So let’s leave it alone. Let’s move on to your adult life, documented events, and relationships. Let’s talk about John Macy, for instance. I know, I know, he was Teacher’s husband, not yours. But from 1905 to about 1914


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(it’s always hard to pinpoint the end of a marriage), the three of you lived together in an old farmhouse you’d bought in Wrentham, Massachusetts, after you graduated from Radcliffe. You not only lived together, but worked together, forging a three-way partnership I like to think of as Helen Keller Enterprises. Macy edited your first book, The Story of My Life, and helped you with your other writings of that period. He also acted as your literary agent, and was quite adept at securing you sizeable advances and generous royalty arrangements. He converted you to socialism, and encouraged you to write about such subjects as poverty, the labor movement, women’s suffrage, etc. Meanwhile, Teacher helped you research your writing, interpreted for you at public appearances, and handled the money. Yes, the Wrentham years were a very happy and productive period. It was the life you’d always dreamed of living. You supported yourself with your writing and lectures. You were in contact with people doing important work in social reform movements. You knew John Reed, Big Bill Haywood, and Emma Goldman, among others. And you loved the big old house that you refurbished according to your tastes. You loved the fields and woods and ponds nearby. But I’m particularly curious about the specifics of your domestic life during those years—the three of you together, sharing that life, that house. Tell me, for instance, about the sleeping arrangements. It’s not as if I’m the first person ever to raise the question. Members of Macy’s own family believed that you were the true object of his affection. And before he married Teacher, yours was the name always linked to his in gossip columns. After all, Teacher was eleven years his senior and—how does one put it nicely?—past her first flower, while you were a couple of years younger than he was and at the height of your physical attractiveness. What’s more, you and he had a lot in common. You’d met him while you were still in college, when he was an instructor at Harvard, an editor of The Youth’s Companion, and among other things, a published poet. The two of you shared intellectual interests. At Harvard, you were both protégés of Charles T. Copeland and William James. You both liked to discuss literature, philosophy, politics, while Teacher . . . it’s not something you ever liked to admit, but you knew you had surpassed Teacher intellectually some time ago. After all, she’d had basically only five or six years of formal education, and was not someone who was engaged by ideas. She helped you with your homework, monitored your reading—making sure you always


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had a classic in your hands rather than some popular trash—but it’s not as if you ever talked about your studies. When you were at Radcliffe, she dutifully spelled all the lectures into your hand, but she was not necessarily following them herself. She read you your French and German and Latin textbooks (your Greek texts were already in Braille), but she had little idea what any of it meant. She was a telephone, transmitting information without really processing it. And she didn’t much care. She valued education as a commodity, an acquisition to mark social status, something superior people ought to have, like good table manners and tasteful attire. So John Macy must have been a revelation to you, a gift. He opened up a new path for you, a way to use your intellect in the world beyond Radcliffe. And you liked him. You shared interests, values, a sense of humor. The intellectual bond between you was profound, and I’m wondering whether that didn’t foster another bond as well. What I’m asking is this. Did the three of you decide that since the world was not ready to accept a marriage between a Normal man like him and a disabled woman like you, to avoid scandal, he should marry Teacher instead? Or did the two of you, Macy and you, keep your relationship, attraction—whatever you want to call it—secret from Teacher? Or did you and Teacher share him? Or did he shuttle from her bed to yours, concealing the truth from both of you? Or what, Helen? June 26 But if you want, I’ll stick to the official story. You liked the man from the moment you met him in 1902, when he came to work with you on The Story of My Life. His interest in you and your work flattered you. It thrilled you to know he was a handsome man. Everybody said so. And even if no one had described him, the fact was obvious to you. As I’m sure you know, attractive people have a way of letting you know even when you can’t see them. They give off an unmistakable self-assurance. So it pleased you that this handsome, intelligent, charming man was interested in you. You liked the feel of his hands when he fingerspelled. He was not the first man who could communicate with you, but all the others were either relatives or as good as relatives. It was different with this man. You enjoyed teasing him about his spelling mistakes. But he got better and better. He was a tireless talker, like you. You talked about poetry and politics.


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52 Blind Rage

You recited from memory passages of Whitman to each other. He read you Hardy and Tolstoy and Wells. His critiques of your work were unstinting, but you appreciated this. It made you feel like you were a real writer, which was what you wanted to be. It occurs to me that Teacher may have seen danger in this growing attraction between you and Macy. She may have detected that he was one of those men who was drawn to you only because of your deafness and blindness. Another sexual predator trolling for his favorite prey. And you, doubly afflicted as you were, might have seemed an especially desirable trophy, two notches in his belt. But if Teacher had sensed that kind of danger, she would have gotten rid of the man. He was not the only editor in the Boston literary community. The last thing she would think of doing was to insert herself as a shield between you and him. I think rather she was flattered by his attention to you because of the way it reflected on her. He admired her work as an educator, her insights and innovations, when a lot of people tended to perceive the success she’d had with you as merely a fluke, or due to your exceptional intelligence alone. So you began to sense something different in Teacher when Macy was around. You noticed she was wearing more scent than she usually did, that she was more agitated than usual on days when he was expected, and more lethargic when he was gone. You’d come upon the two of them, their heads bowed together over your manuscript, the low murmuring of their conversation making the air electric. “So Teacher’s in love,” you thought. You’d read books; you knew the signs. You found yourself walking around the house smiling all the time. Teacher would get irritated and say, “What’s so funny, Helen?” And you’d shake your head, saying, “Not funny, Teacher,” but you wouldn’t say more. You got a kick out of being the go-between. You’d say to him, “Did you notice Teacher’s new dress?” and force him to describe it to you in detail. “He said you looked lovely,” you’d tell her later. She would flutter her hands dismissively. “He just said that to be polite,” she’d say, but you could feel how pleased she was. “Lovely,” you thought, imagining how it would feel to have him say it about you. Little by little, you broached the topic with her. “Marriage?” she’d say with her new, fluttery hands. “Don’t be silly.”


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You’d cock your head and arched your eyebrows in a way you hoped looked knowing. “It could happen.” Your expression amused her. She’d smooth your face with her hand, “Where do you come up with this nonsense?” she’d say, meaning both the idea and the funny face. “Anyway, what would you do if I got married? It’s out of the question.” “I’m a grown woman,” you’d argue. “Why should that make any . . . ” But she’d always walk away from you. Still, you felt you were making progress simply by forcing her to entertain the idea. Then one day you blurted, “If you refuse to marry him because of me, I’ll feel like a hideous accident.” It was a little extreme, especially since he hadn’t said anything about marriage to anyone yet, but you knew that exaggeration was often the only way to get Teacher’s attention. “Really, Helen! I hardly think he intends to . . .” “But he will,” you insisted. “I can feel it.” And sure enough, one day he came to you and said, “You must know, Helen, how I feel about . . .” You drew your hand away before he could finish. Then you said, “Yes, I know, John. You and Teacher are perfect for each other.” You felt him start, then hesitate. “Teacher?” he said at last, his hands suddenly awkward with the name. “Yes, Teacher is, well, wonderful, a wonderful person. But what I meant is . . . ” Again you withdrew your hand. Then you said, “You must talk to Teacher. You must tell her how you feel.” “But I don’t feel . . . ” he began and stopped. “Teacher’s not the one I . . .” All right, so I’m hinting at something which maybe never happened. Can’t slip anything by you can I, Helen? Back to the official story. In the official story, he proposed to Teacher and she refused him several times. He consulted with you, and it pleased you that at last there was someone who understood that you were an expert on Teacher, just as she was an expert on you. “She’s a very complex person,” you advised him sagely. “You must be patient, John.” Then finally, she assented and they got married. For a while it was good; at least you seemed to think so. The house in Wrentham was full of interesting people and full of talk, new ideas, and literary activity. He was your brother, your buddy, your sidekick. And Teacher was happy, or as happy as she ever was. You had to console her when she didn’t get pregnant. “Be patient,” you


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54 Blind Rage

said, though privately you wondered if she was in fact too old to conceive, or if all the various major and minor maladies that were beginning to affect her health made it impossible for her body to support new life. There were other tensions as well. Her politics were never as radical as Macy’s. She complained about the constant flow of guests through the house, disrupting the regular routines she preferred. She found some of his friends patronizing, and others pretentious. She was bothered by the unkempt (to put it nicely) appearance of the more radical types, and locked up the silver when they were around. He disparaged her rage for order as hopelessly bourgeois. They disagreed about you as well. He thought, for instance, that you should work to improve your speaking voice, because if you spoke some of your lectures aloud, instead of working through an interpreter all the time, it would make them that much more affecting and effective. She resisted at first, then, characteristically, went to the opposite extreme, “driving you” (his words) to work at it until your voice croaked and everyone’s nerves frizzed. Money was an issue, too. He was better at spending it than making it. He gave up or “lost” (her word) his teaching post at Harvard, and his writing earned little. He had expensive tastes and a rich man’s habits. You paid his tailor bills, his ever-increasing bar tabs, his club fees, the rent on a flat in Boston he felt he needed to have, and finally even financed a fourmonth European tour for him. You never begrudged him these things, but Teacher was always ready to deliver a to-the-penny reckoning of his selfindulgences. And she did not always withhold snide comments about the freeloading of his more Bohemian friends. While you, Helen, were still the go-between, shuttling back and forth between them like a bead on a string. You did your best, smoothing her ruffled feathers, jollying him along. But it wasn’t always that easy. One day, the three of you would be around the dinner table having one of your political discussions, and Teacher would remark tartly, “Listen to you two social reformers with all your grand schemes. And neither of you ever knowing hunger a day in your life.” Or else you’d be discussing women’s suffrage, and John would say to Teacher, “Admit it. The real reason you oppose it is that if you had the vote, you’d lose the right to blame the ills of government on men.” They said all this to you, through you, around you. Maybe you all laughed as if it were all just a joke. But you sensed that the words they spoke con-


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cealed words they were not speaking. The words were small missiles they launched at each other, meant to wound and weaken. But what they really meant, you could not say. And words weren’t always the issue. You’d walk into the kitchen, and the air would be as brittle as dry pastry. You’d ask first her and then him, “What is it?” and each would say, “Nothing,” and leave the room. Or you’d feel the front door slam and find Teacher in the parlor, shaking with sobs. Sometimes she would disappear into her room for a whole morning, or a whole day, or more. Sometimes he would take off for weeks at a time, and when he came back, he would be rife with whisky and sullen with recriminations. Until finally one day he left, and it was clear he was not coming back. Teacher said, “Good riddance,” and you wanted to argue, because you knew she was wrong, knew she didn’t mean it, but you also knew it was hopeless. So in a lot of ways, theirs was not unlike a lot of other marriages, not unlike my parents’ marriage, if you must know, except for the fact that there were no children, and for the fact that there was you. And I have to believe that you were more than just the go-between, the mediator, the observer, the confidante. June 27 Since today’s your birthday, I’ll give you a break and quit badgering you. But, I confess that the man John Macy intrigues me. So while I was at the library today (yes, despite all indications to the contrary, I do have other work to do besides tormenting you), I did some research. I got my assistant to look Macy up, and we perused a couple of his books. Then she read me the entry about him in an encyclopedia of American scholars. It summarized his scholarly work, outlined his theory of American literature, mentioned his socialism and the impact it had on his career at Harvard. When my assistant was done reading, I said, “Is that all?” She was perplexed; she knew this had nothing to do with my work at the university. She said, “Yes. There’s just these four pages.” She scanned the index and found a few other references to his name. But there was no mention of his connection to you, no mention of his marriage to Teacher. I considered consulting another reference book, but hesitated. This assistant is paid by the department, so I am only supposed to use her to help me with reading specifically related to my job, and I don’t want her to


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feel I’m misusing her services. Besides, I do have other reading I need her to do for me. I checked out his book About Women, however, and gave it to my other assistant, who is paid by me and is accustomed to my weird reading habits. I’m hoping this book will reveal something. I know how worried Teacher was when it came out in 1930, even though she and Macy hadn’t spoken to each other for fifteen years. It’ll take a while for her to scan it. Then I’ll let you know what I think. July 11 So I read Macy’s About Women. This assistant of mine is speedy, and it’s a quick read. It’s a familiar female-bashing rant dressed up as an attempt by a thinking man to save women from feminism. This may have seemed more original in 1930, but today, it’s the sort of thing any reactionary crank can spout in his sleep. Nowadays, he would use the word “feminazi.” From this book, I get the sense of a man who is quite smart—welleducated, well-trained, at ease with literary and historical references—and quick, even facile. I sense it was his very facility that was his failing. His arguments are glib, patronizing—and I’m not just saying this because I disagree with him. He dismisses opposing viewpoints in a way that reveals his insecurities. But mostly there’s something sad about him. I sense his bitterness over the reception of his scholarly work, the belittlement of his political work, his failed marriage, and whatever followed. And yes, a drinker, too. He was drinking even when you knew him. And the fifteen years of drinking after he left took a toll. The book has the quality of the drunkard’s rant—lively, entertaining in its way, following the forms of intellectual discourse, but with nothing substantitive to carry out of the bar. But charming too, I have to say that. At least he believes he’s charming. And he’s writing for a female reader he feels he can win over, because he’s always been able to win women over. “Yes, he’s a Neanderthal,” we’re supposed to say, “but isn’t he cute?” Am I on target at all, Helen? All the while I was reading the book, I had the funny feeling that I was reading it exactly as you must have, with the same eager attention to the text between the lines. I imagined the three of you—Teacher, Polly Thomson (the woman who joined your entourage around the time Macy left), and


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you—huddled around your hot-off-the-press copy. By 1930, Teacher’s eyes were too bad for her to read it herself, so Polly had to read it aloud to her, while she spelled it to you. So you would have been gathering in both Macy’s words and the feel of Teacher’s hands as she transcribed them. I imagine some tension must have come into her hands at the various references to women who couldn’t or wouldn’t have children, not to mention during the whole chapter extolling motherhood as the one true calling of women. And his rather muddled discussion of the myth about how a woman must have an orgasm in order to conceive must have seemed a pointed reference to her. What, was he calling her frigid? Perhaps she didn’t say this, but you can’t deny that you thought it yourself. Then there was the one reference to you, by name, in the chapter about the value of women’s loquaciousness as a means to teach their children the language. I’m sure you must have paused in the reading, then gone back to read the paragraph over. There is a specific reference to Teacher, where he says that few children, normal or defective, have had such good instruction. I imagine this made Teacher smirk, “Well, he’d have to mention me, since his whole argument about language acquisition comes from my method.” But then she’d go back to being irked, “Typical,” her fingers tapped. “He can’t even summon the good grace to give me direct credit.” And that was all she would say about it. When the reading was over, she dismissed the book with a shrug. “Innocuous enough,” she said. “And anyway, who’s going to read it?” So long as he had the decency to leave her name out of it, she didn’t care what sort of misogyny he put on paper. She was not the feminist you were. But you, Helen? I sense that you found it harder to let it pass. It must have bothered you that he’d changed his views. He’d been in favor of women’s suffrage when you knew him, and had encouraged your own activism in that cause. Also, it must have hurt that his only reference to you was to those early years of your childhood. Nothing about you as an adult woman, a writer, an activist, a thinker. No mention of the years he knew you, the years he lived with you, whatever the truth of that arrangement was. He did say that you had “a remarkably strong mind and sound body.” Why mention your body, I’d like to know. What did he know about your body, Helen? A figure of speech, you say. All right, have it your way. But I sense the book left you, as it left me, feeling sad and unsatisfied. Unfinished business. You wished you could read it again, or at least a few


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key passages. But how? You couldn’t very well ask Polly to read it again, with all the other work she had to do. And if Teacher knew you were wasting Polly’s time with that, it would not be pretty. You might have considered sending it out to be brailled, but that too could get back to Teacher. “Why, Helen? Why do you want to dwell on that?” she would ask. You might have considered writing him a letter. For all I know, you did write one; Macy was not the best person at preserving his papers. But what would you say? “I read the book and I was sorry to learn that you . . . ” What, Helen? I can’t finish your sentence either. Since this book was so unsatisfying, I have now checked out his book on socialism, which he wrote while he was still in your life. I hope there may be some personal anecdotes about the Wobblies and the other people in your circle then. Maybe it will give me some clue to your own political philosophy. In the meantime, I found a photograph of him in one of your biographies. It’s a formal portrait, full-face close-up, taken circa 1900 when he would have been in his twenties. I showed it to my husband Nick, and to a woman friend. She said he’s handsome and has a very sensitive mouth. Nick said he looks weak and selfish, but did not connect these qualities to any of Macy’s features. From what I know of him, I think he probably was selfish and weak, perhaps because he was handsome and sensitive. My reading assistant looked at it too. She told me he had glasses, “You know, those little round wire-rimmed granny glasses like John Lennon used to wear.” We also found another picture of the three of you together. This one is 1914, so near the end. He’s seated, with Teacher leaning over the chair behind him. She has a hand on his right shoulder; the other rests on the back of his chair. You’re standing to the right, your face lowered, your hand outstretched. He has what looks like a letter in his left hand. Teacher is apparently reading it over his shoulder while he spells it to you. My assistant tells me all this. It’s something she’s very good at. As you know, some sighted people are better at describing things than others. I get her to take my finger and trace the outlines of the photo so I can feel the posture of each of your bodies. I find myself feeling the positions of your bodies in my own muscles and bones. Then I find myself expanding on those sensations. The words that describe how things look make me imag-


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ine not so much in images as in spatial terms, the space around things, the energy between things. I know you know what I mean. So what I sense is this. I feel Teacher there behind John’s chair, a hand on either side of him. I feel tension in her upper arms to hold that pose when what she really wants to do is extend her arms around him on either side, embrace him, encircle him. At the same time, I feel the way her upper body inclines over him, and the energy of her spine, reaching up then swooping down and around him in another circle. I feel her body wanting to make a sphere around him. Then I feel him inside the sphere, at once comfortable and ill at ease. He’s neither nestling into it nor pulling away. And then there’s his hand reaching out past her enfolding body, piercing the shell of the sphere she’s trying to make, to reach for your hand, Helen. Your posture is very erect, almost rigid. It’s odd because by this time in your life—what were you? 34?—you’d gotten pretty good at posing for pictures. But this pose does not feel natural to me. So the two of them are supposedly reading this letter together, and he’s spelling it in your hand. Yes, it’s a pose, but what a perfect opportunity to say something unseen, to get word to you out of range of Teacher’s hovering gaze. What is he saying to you, Helen? I feel the blunt ends of his fingers in your palm. I feel his fingers extending into an L. For what word? Later? Love? July 20 The man mattered to you. You can’t deny it. And those nine or ten years with him at your house at Wrentham were, if not the happiest of your life, at least the most central, most formative. You were living a dream, a dream someone might have even today. The literary-political commune, the nontraditional family—I don’t know what name to give it because it’s not a dream I have. But you lived it, the three of you, sharing affection, labor, and aspirations. And even while there was turmoil, it was never boring while he was there. This has been so much on my mind that I actually took a trip to Wrentham. To be honest, Nick and I were going to Cape Cod for a few days anyway, and Wrentham is on the way, so it’s not as if I took a special trip. It’s


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a very pretty, picturesque New England village, and it was a very warm, fine day, perfect for sightseeing. We started at the central green where there’s now a stone memorial to you. It quotes you as saying that you always considered Wrentham to be your home. I suspect you said this about a lot of places during your life, but I think that in the case of Wrentham, you really meant it. After a stroll around the green, we found your house without much trouble. It’s now divided into apartments, I assume for people who work in Boston and want to live in a small town without the hassle of owning a house. There’s a second structure on the property, a kind of annex, built farther back from the road. This is meant to be in the same style as your house, but Nick said the attempt was not entirely successful. In between, there’s a small parking lot and about a dozen mailboxes. Judging from photographs, the exterior of the house is relatively unchanged since your day, though I think there used to be a porch facing the road. The front lawn had recently been torn up, apparently to do some work on the water lines or something, but once they reseed, it should be fine. There’s a nice flower garden in the back. I wondered if there might be some hearty perennials that you planted, maybe some of your mother’s roses you brought from Tuscumbia, but I couldn’t tell. I touched a section of the stone wall that you and Macy helped to build. I assume they were the same stones. We prowled around and around the house. Nick took pictures, some of me, but the sun was in my eyes, and it was hard for me to look natural, even to smile, and I don’t know why. I kept telling myself that this was a place where you were happy, but I had a hard time feeling it. I reminded myself of the events that took place there, the books you wrote, the people who visited. I forced myself to think of the good times. For example, you and Macy planted an apple orchard there. It was your job to climb into the trees and shake out the fruit for him to gather up. More often than not, however, the deer got most of the crop because, sentimental urbanites that you were, you refused to chase them away. We did not go inside the house. There were a few cars in the lot, so we might have found someone to let us in, but in a way, I didn’t want to go inside. I knew I would not find what I was looking for. I mean, it’s not as if the walls or floorboards were going to speak to me, tell me the truth once and for all about you and John Macy. I kept telling myself that this was


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where you were happy, but I felt no trace of it, only a poignant nostalgia that may have come from the beauty of the day and the general peace of the place. So as a research trip, it was something of a failure. Or else I was looking for the wrong thing. Just so you’ll know, there is a plaque over what must have once been the front door, saying that you and Teacher once lived there. No mention of John Macy, not that his name would mean anything to anyone today. But I know it was John who made the place matter to you. After he left, the place changed. At first, there must have been a welcome relief from the tension of the last years of his presence, but that must have faded soon enough to a sense of loss. Maybe that’s what made me feel the way I did when I was there. You saw him occasionally at first, and continued to stay in touch. When you published Midstream in 1929, you sent him a copy with the most affectionate inscription, full of forgiving goodwill. Longing, too, as if you wished that somehow the two of you could have maintained some kind of relationship even while Teacher and he could not. And much later, when you were in your eighties and began to have the minor strokes that diminished your final five or six years, the people around you reported that in your confusion, you thought you were back in those years at Wrentham, living in hectic, happy turmoil with Teacher and John. You startled people, saying abruptly, “Has John left for the train?” or “When Teacher comes in, tell her John and I want to go over my article again.” And no one had the heart to tell you that John and Teacher and that happy life together were all long gone. But I suspect it’s unwise to make too much of the random reshuffling of a short-circuiting brain. There are two facts I have trouble fitting into any pattern. One is that Teacher never divorced the man, even though she knew he’d taken up with another woman and even had a child with her. Because of the child, he asked for a divorce, and Teacher started proceedings, but never followed through. Maybe she had religious objections; she was raised a Catholic though she was not practicing. Or maybe she was still in love with him; she always kept his name, and when he died in 1932, she considered herself his widow. Or maybe it was just irrational spite, the willful desire not to give him the satisfaction. I know these things are complicated; as it happens, my mother never divorced my father, even though they did not speak


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to each other for the last twenty years of their lives. She had no religious objection to divorce and was not in love with him. She claimed that it was a matter of money, that since she had more than he did, she didn’t want to be forced to divide her property with him. To be fair, I doubt he would have demanded a financial settlement, and I suspect she had other reasons for resisting divorce. I bring it up because I sense that Teacher may have expressed similar concerns. Any thoughts from you, Helen? The other fact troubling me has to do with the woman he lived with after Teacher—the mother of his child. Little seems to be known about her except that she was a sculptress, and that she was deaf. Deaf like you, Helen. Any thoughts on that? July 21, late I can’t put these facts together, Helen, and now I’m losing sleep over it. Humor me while I go through it again. Despite his initial attraction to you, which maybe he never really did acknowledge, announce, or act upon, John Macy married Teacher. For a while, everything was fine. Then things started to fall apart, as I’ve already sketched. Perhaps among all the other tensions and disappointments, he felt jealous of her attachment to you, Helen. He wanted to be the center of her attention and you already occupied that position. Perhaps his jealousy made him start to see other women—why else did he need that flat in Boston? Perhaps the other woman was you. I imagine a scene of discovery: “John? Helen! What are you doing?” And then she threw him out and refused to divorce him as a way to prevent him from marrying you? Or else, as I’ve already suggested, the Macy marriage was a sham to conceal the union between him and you. For a while this worked, then perhaps he tired of the pretense. Why had he agreed to it? he started to wonder. He was a modern thinker, a social reformer. Why should he care what people thought? Then he started to resent the connection between you and Teacher. He was living a pretense because you wanted it that way, so the least you could do was make him feel the center of your attention. But Teacher was always there. Whenever anything happened, you always went to Teacher first. So then perhaps his resentment turned to suspicion, and then perhaps his suspicions were confirmed. I imagine a different scene of discovery: “Helen! What are you doing with her?”


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I keep coming back to that. Anyone who thinks about it would have to come back to that. So the inevitable question is this: Did he have to find out about it once he’d been married to her for a while, or were you open about it from the start? Was the Macy marriage a sham to conceal another truth? He was a modern man, a man of the world. He valued the both of you enough to want to protect you. It was one thing when you were a child or a girl in school. Then, your close intimacy with Teacher could be perceived as, well, a teacher–pupil relationship, raising no eyebrows. But once you were out in the world, two unmarried women living together—even in 1905 people would have to wonder. There were plenty of people, even friends of yours, who wondered why Teacher stayed with you after you graduated from Radcliffe, why she didn’t become the teacher of some other deaf-blind child. So maybe John Macy offered himself as cover for your Boston marriage. In private notes and letters, he sometimes called Teacher Bill and you Billy. Why male nicknames? What am I to make of that? What did he get out of it? Perhaps it was a marriage of convenience that allowed him to pursue whatever relationships he liked—there were all sorts of people in and out of the house all the time. On the other hand, it’s a popular male fantasy, you know—one man, two women. So was he a cover? Was he a heterosexual experiment (for her, for you, for both?) that didn’t work out? A three-way thing? Or what? July 22 Face it Helen, what your biographers find so threatening about the idea of your sexuality comes from the fear that you might have been a lesbian. Personally, it makes no difference to me. I have no stake in preserving the notion of you as heterosexual virgin. I would like to believe that you had sex with someone: him, her, it doesn’t matter. What seems most significant is that you and Teacher lived together in a state of complete intimacy for almost fifty years. Whether or not you would define it as such, there may have been some sexual aspect to your relationship with Teacher. Whether or not you ever acted on it is something I will never know, because you sure as hell aren’t going to tell me. And it hardly matters. So let’s agree on that and skip the specifics. And let’s agree too that whatever the nature of your relationship with Teacher, it changed when John Macy was there. Again,


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we can bypass the details. And let’s agree too that in some measure what broke up their marriage had something to do with you. Fine. See, we’re making progress, Helen. OK. So whatever the specifics might be, things were different when John Macy was there. And things were different when he was gone. It seems to me safe to assume that things did not go back to the way they’d been before he was on the scene. There was a period of readjustment. You and Teacher stayed on at Wrentham, kept in touch with the people you’d met through John, reacquainted yourselves with people John had disapproved of. You were busy with the Chautauqua lecture circuit. You hired Polly Thomson as housekeeper, road manager, heavy lifter, and companion. She would stay with you for the next forty years and more. The presence of a new person added to the readjustment, the general atmosphere of flux. And it was this atmosphere of unsettled uncertainty, this sense of everything changed and changing, which cleared the way for Peter Fagan. Come on, Helen. You knew I’d have to get around to him eventually. One of the hazards of leading a life as public as yours is that even the events you’d rather forget are a part of the public record. The records of the Boston registry office, to be exact, an application for a marriage license signed by one Peter Fagan and one Helen Adams Keller. That’s a fact, Helen. Here are other facts. Sometime in 1916, Peter Fagan was hired to be your secretary. You’d been acquainted for a while. He was a friend of a friend of John Macy’s, someone from the same literary political circle. He was to assist you with your correspondence and other writing, and to perform whatever clerical tasks you needed. He also accompanied you to lectures and other functions to act as interpreter when Teacher was too tired. Teacher’s health had become a problem, now aggravated by the stress of the breakup of her marriage. On top of that, she had developed a respiratory condition presumed to be tuberculosis. It was decided that she would go for the cure at Saranac Lake or Lake Placid, taking Polly with her. You were to go spend the time with your sister, Mildred, in Montgomery. Your mother, who had come north to help close up the house, received a phone call, then read a newspaper story, reporting that you and Fagan had applied for the marriage license. There was a discussion. Soon afterward, Fagan was gone. The Wrentham household divided as planned. After only a few weeks at Lake Placid, Teacher and Polly left for Puerto Rico, where


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they stayed until the following spring. You remained in Montgomery. It is rumored that Fagan resettled in Florida, but you never heard from him again. Or almost never. Your sister reported that while you were staying with her in Montgomery, Fagan showed up. One morning, she saw you talking to a stranger on the front porch. It was a young man, and he was spelling into your hand. She summoned her husband, Warren, who in timehonored Southern male fashion, got his gun. There was some heated talk, and finally the man went away. A few nights later, Mildred heard a noise and roused Warren. He went and investigated, then came back with a bemused smile. He said you were out on the porch again, dressed for traveling, with a packed suitcase beside you. In the morning, you were still there. The only other recorded event that might have some relevance was that there was a fire in the house while you were staying there, a fire that started in your room. The family had to evacuate, the fire department was called, etc. You claimed the fire was an accident—faulty wiring or something. But given the state of mind you must have been in, I’m wondering if something else happened. Were you burning something, Helen—his love letters or other keepsakes? But this is only a detail. So those are the facts. The obvious interpretation of these facts is that you, naive and sheltered as you were, found yourself swept off your feet by this young man, while Teacher and your mother could see him for what he really was. They saw him as an interloper and opportunist, ready to take you away from them and exploit your earning power to his own advantage. Of course, there’s a possibility that while they claimed to be protecting your interests, they were actually protecting their own. You were the breadwinner. You supported the Wrentham household, were still sending money home to your mother—and who knows?—maybe even a few bucks on the sly every now and then to John. They may have been worried that your marriage would alter those arrangements, might leave them in the lurch. Or did they view Fagan in a more neutral light? Maybe they believed he was in earnest, that he really loved you, and wanted you as a wife rather than a cash cow. So their worries were about you. They didn’t know how well you would manage in domestic life. And (here’s the ugly part) they were worried about what would happen if you had children. Even today, Helen, the world is not thrilled by the prospect of disabled people reproducing. In your day, even people who had an enlightened view, people who should


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66 Blind Rage

have known better, might have balked at the idea. Your old friend Dr. Bell was a leader in the eugenics movement. Even you published a few lines here and there advising the “afflicted” not to have children. Really, Helen! Where was your head? The “afflicted” who live on after you are still dealing with that. For instance, people take for granted that I don’t have children because I don’t want to reproduce my defective genes. Who would want to risk bringing a blind child into the world? On two separate occasions in my life, women have told me that they would abort a fetus if they knew it would grow up to be blind. As you know, people will say the damnedest things to the “afflicted.” There’s no topic too intimate, no statement too insensitive. But I wasn’t going to argue with these women about their manners or their reproductive choices. If they felt that way about blindness, what kind of mothers would they be for those blind children? But back to you. Whether or not Teacher and your mother assumed that you would have produced a defective infant (your condition was caused by illness, not genes), I surmise they assumed you could not be trusted to care for a child yourself. How would you know when it was crying? What if it rolled under the sofa and got stuck? How would you ever find it? Not that they would have said that to you. I sense the discussion never got that far. What exactly did they say? “Sorry, Helen. We can’t let this happen. You can’t have this man and he can’t have you because . . . ” Because what? That’s what I want to know. I don’t doubt that their motives were muddled, if not impure. But I’d like to know how they presented them to you. Whether or not you believed them is another matter. So leave yourself out of it if you want. Give me their side of the argument and leave your words blank. I’ll settle for that. GK July 23 I imagine your mother found the situation especially distressing. She may have assumed that your blindness and deafness made you unmarriageable, so she was utterly unprepared to consider this man, or any man, as a suitable husband for her daughter. This is a confrontation she might have expected to have with your sister but never with you. I imagine her sitting alone in the front parlor of your house, trying to think what to say to you. What words will she find to express what’s wrong with this union?


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How will she even begin? None of her inner turmoil appears on the surface, however. The surface is serene. She is the very image of the well-bred Southern lady. She is an Adams, who claims kinship with the first family of that name—something she never lets anyone forget. She sits in the small wingback armchair by the empty hearth. Her spine is straight, but not rigid. A very keen observer (like you, Helen, if you could see) might notice that her glances—first at the window, then at the mantle clock—are rather too quick and furtive. But an ordinary observer would only see a middle-aged woman at rest. Then there is a sound at the front door and she rises, then sits again almost in the same second. The movement is so rapid it could be taken for a weird, full-body spasm, an all-over twitch. But the sound is only the rather clumsy housemaid polishing the door knocker. Your mother connects the shock she feels with the sound of the reporter’s voice on the telephone, the rapid-fire questions, the roughness of his tone. Despite all the time she’s spent with you up North, she’s never quite gotten used to Yankee speech. This has less to do with the harsh, flat, unlilting sounds of the words than with the brutal quickness, the rough, overloud immoderation of it. And this was no ordinary Yankee on the telephone, but a newspaperman, bent, she realizes after the fact, on getting her to admit something without meaning to. Her husband, the Captain, was a newspaperman too, of course, but of a different sort altogether. He always instructed his reporters on rules of etiquette, especially when addressing a lady. But this one had shown no such deference. In fact, she thinks now, his rudeness may have even been a deliberate ploy meant to shock her into making an unwitting quotable quote. She could have said much. She never quite approved of bringing Mr. Fagan into your household. Sitting there now, she draws some strength from this. She went so far as to voice her objections at the time. His political views were even more radical than Mr. Macy’s, not to mention the fact that it was Mr. Macy who recommended him in the first place. Out of respect for Miss Sullivan (she never got used to calling her Mrs. Macy), she did not harp on this explicitly before. But now she steels herself with the intention to say it again if the need arises, not so much an “I told you so” as a “Don’t blame me.” Even leaving aside his politics and other connections, it always seemed to her not quite proper to bring a young man into the household in that capacity, and to put him in that kind of constant contact with you, Helen. Not that she dislikes him. In fact, she finds him rather


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68 Blind Rage

charming, certainly very polite, even courtly in a way she supposes some find old-fashioned. And the past few months, his presence in the house and on tour has created a different atmosphere, a more spontaneous and cheerfully chaotic hustle-bustle. Still, it never ceased to make her pull up short to walk into a room and see him there beside you, his fingers moving inside your cupped palm. And once (your mother won’t admit this to Miss Sullivan, of course) one late afternoon sitting in the garden, she watched the two of you moving through the flower beds, your hands touching as you chatted idly, then your hand reaching to touch his lips and throat, to feel him speak the name of some flower. It made her dreamily conscious, and (this the part she doesn’t even admit to herself) almost pleased that an unknowing passerby would see the young couple and read these gestures as the innocent explorations of new love. But what shocks her most, Helen, is you. Once she finally hung up on that reporter, she went to find you, but could not bring herself to say anything. You were where you usually are, at your typewriter, answering letters. As occasionally happens, you were so engrossed in your work, you didn’t notice her presence at first. She stared down at your face, scanning every familiar feature, and was shocked to discover she could see there no sign of your—what else could she call it, Helen?—your deception. You looked as you always looked. It made her wonder, and there was longing in this of course, whether the newspaper man on the phone had gotten it all wrong. Because it’s almost intolerable to her that you could be keeping this secret from her, that you could be capable of keeping any secret at all. Since you are so dependent on others for access to the outside world, it seems impossible that you could preserve anything on the inside that they did not know. And this came to your mother in the words, “She’s lying to me. My Helen is lying to me!”—an ugly revelation most mothers have and get over when their child is three. And thinking the thought again, mouthing the words again, a throb rises in your mother’s throat, which might have escaped as a sob except that at that moment the door is flung open and Miss Sullivan comes in. She strides across the room in the deliberate, almost mannish way of hers that your mother always finds disconcerting. She straightens herself, swallows the sob, composes her feelings, as Miss Sullivan continues across the room. And she recalls briefly the first alarm of seeing this woman, almost thirty years ago, climbing down from the train and striding across


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the platform, her spine so straight it almost made a person curious about the skeletal structure underneath. Your mother was prepared to like the Yankee girl. Her heart swelled to see the small, erect figure wearing the unseasonably heavy wool dress. She imagined herself taking this poor but courageous girl under her wing as a companion, a confidante, a surrogate sister. But when they shook hands there at the station, the courageous girl looked past your mother, looked through her, in a way that was not merely shy or socially awkward but downright rude. Her bearing showed she was eager to bypass these formalities and get down to business. Her indifference showed clearly that she saw your mother as all but irrelevant to the enterprise she was undertaking. Mrs. Keller was merely “the mother.” The best she could do was to stay out of the way. She has that same bearing still, your mother can’t help noticing. And the observation stokes her fears. In the same instant, she remembers something else about that first day, the look in her husband’s eyes as he took in the newcomer’s appearance. “Why did they have to send a beautiful one?” she’d thought at the time, and thinks again now, deflating further. Teacher is no longer beautiful, of course. The years have really taken it out of her, or rather, piled it on her. She has taken on flesh, as women will in middle age. But on Teacher, it seems more an unnatural swelling, an all-over puffiness. And while you flourish under the rigors of your life— the endless correspondence and other writing, the constant stream of new people, the meetings, and lectures, and receptions—they have drained her dry. Her eyes give her trouble all the time now. The skin around them is puckered in a permanent squint. All the extra weight impairs her movements. Sometimes her ankles are so swollen, she can barely hobble across the room. In bad weather, all her joints ache. And now there’s this new respiratory complaint. Still, when riled as now, there is something startling about her, something that catches the breath. Because what people are aware of when they see her is not her face or body, but energy animating them. Watching her now, your mother sees the layers of swollen flesh peel away, along with the wrinkles and graying hair, and the small, erect, vibrant body of thirty years ago steps free. Then your mother notices the newspaper the other woman is carrying. She drops it into the armchair opposite your mother’s, as if she is not only done with it but has found nothing of interest there. Your mother rises slowly


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70 Blind Rage

to reach for it, but stops, afraid of what it will contain. So the two women face each other again, as for the first time. Miss Sullivan lifts off her hat, pats her hair, jabs the pin back into the band, and without a word of greeting, says again as she did that first day at Ivy Green, “And where is Helen?” Your mother does not answer. She takes the paper and pulls it open. “It’s all there,” Miss Sullivan tells her wearily. She leans against the mantle briefly, then begins pacing the floor. Your mother sinks back into her armchair. She finds the short article but cannot focus her eyes on the newsprint. It is a relief to have the pages held up around her face so she isn’t obliged to watch Miss Sullivan pacing back to the door, then back to the hearth, and back again. She hears it, though, and marvels again that a woman supposedly in such poor health, can throw down each step with such strength that the very walls rattle. Your mother is trying not to cower. She’s trying to summon her rehearsed speeches, but is not doing very well with it. “As you may remember, I always had my doubts about the wisdom, the propriety, of engaging . . . employing a young man to . . .” But Miss Sullivan is not listening, only pacing. She stops in the middle of the room now. She blinks at your mother as if surprised to see her there and says, “I didn’t think to check the other papers. I suppose they’ll all have the story now.” Even in her trepidation, it occurs to your mother that there really was no need for Miss Sullivan to walk all the way down to the station just to buy the paper. She could have sent one of the servants. They are a rag-tag bunch, your mother thinks, undisciplined and strange. But surely one of them could have been trusted with a task as simple as that. But it is precisely the sort of thing Miss Sullivan is prone to do. She martyrs herself to fuel her own indignation. In another minute, the exertion will make her start coughing. “The first thing we’ll have to do is call the paper and have them print a retraction,” she says, on the move again, mumbling. Then she stops, turns, glowers down at your mother. “Exactly what did you say to that reporter?” “Well, I hardly had time to catch my breath. I . . .” Your mother feels an agitated sob rising in her voice now, a shrill, hysterical quaver. “I disengaged the line at once, as soon as I realized . . . I neither confirmed nor denied anything. He telephoned back, but I told Polly to say I was home to no one.”


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“Good,” Miss Sullivan says, and your mother can’t help but feel a flush of pride at being praised. Then this is replaced by a sting of resentment that this woman feels it her right to praise her, your mother. She is not the pupil here, after all. But Miss Sullivan is musing now, holding her chin in her hand. “That’s right. So he has no actual corroboration. Only a signature on a marriage license, which could be a forgery. Could be anyone. Surely Helen Keller is not such an unusual name. And the clerks at such places are not terribly observant. They must see a hundred couples a day.” Her words end abruptly. Your mother looks at her, then looks where she is looking. And together they see you, Helen, gliding down the stairs. And though they knew you would be coming down any minute, it’s as if they’re shocked to see you there. They are simultaneously struck breathless by you, your appearance, how lovely you are. Not pretty. Even your mother would be quick to acknowledge that. But you have a quality. You’ve always had it. A quality that draws the gaze. And the quality is heightened by the dress you have on, which is newer and fancier than your usual day-at-home outfits. And your hair seems slightly more elaborate than usual, or maybe it’s just the way the humidity has curled a few stray tendrils to make a hazy frame around your face. They haven’t been paying attention. You’ve been looking this way for weeks, if not longer. It’s understandable they didn’t notice while you were on tour, since on tour you are expected to make a good appearance. But even since you’ve been home, you’ve been uncharacteristically fussy about it, asking four and five times a day, “Do I look all right? Is my hair all right? Do these gloves go with this hat?” What they realize, suddenly, is that you’ve started dressing for a man. You’ve started making an effort to make yourself visually appealing, a vision of loveliness, a feast for the eyes, for him. As they watch you glide across the room, each of them recalls a hundred minor instances of altered behavior that should have tripped an alarm. You have been eating less and smiling more. You’ve been embracing them more often than usual. Your letters to friends have been more effusively affectionate. You’ve taken to hugging the dogs until they yelp for freedom. You cross the room to stand near them. Your mother watches the other woman watching you. Without warning, something in Teacher’s look sparks a maternal instinct in her, the same instinct that compels a mother to steer an eager toddler away from an open flame. But she knows it’s already too late to intervene.


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72 Blind Rage

You stop near Teacher. Your nostrils flare slightly, and you say lazily, “Have you been out already?” “Yes,” she spells to you and says aloud for your mother, “I’ve been to get the paper. There’s some rather distressing news.” The words distressing news are almost a code between you. She’s always used them to prepare you for tragedy. She used them to announce the death of your first dog, Lioness, when you were ten, and the death of your father when you were sixteen. But your mind is elsewhere. “What news? News from Europe? The war . . . ?” “No. News from home,” she says. “Domestic news. Guess who’s getting married?” Your first thought is John. You know that there’s been no formal divorce yet, but it would be like John to get mixed up with some woman and allow the rumor to be circulated before legal matters were finalized. You can imagine him speechifying about Byzantine divorce laws and bourgeois morality in a way that would make you laugh, if only it were about other people. John remarried, you think, but to whom? It’s been so long since his name has been spoken in this house, so you hesitate and say only, “Who’s getting married?” Teacher says, “You are, Helen.” Your hand jerks away from hers and dangles by your side for a full two seconds. Then you sweep it up to rest on your chest, and contort your face into a clownish mask of mute astonishment. Your mouth gapes; your eyebrows hoist your lids so high, your eyeballs protrude dangerously from their sockets. Good try, Helen, but the gesture needs work. Because you have never seen it done correctly, you don’t know that those two seconds of hesitation give it all away. Your performance is so unconvincing that even your mother can’t help but say, “I can’t believe she’s trying to deceive us this way.” Of course, you’re oblivious to all this. You break your pose with a kind of gasp and ask Teacher, “Who do they think I’m marrying?” “Whom,” Teacher corrects automatically, then replies, “Peter Fagan, of course.” “Peter!” you say aloud, which sounds more like “Pee-duh,” and does nothing to help your case. Your brain is on a treadmill. It pumps and strains but gets nowhere. You’ve talked about this, you and Peter, discussed how best to deliver the news to them. You’ve rehearsed various speeches. But


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the possibility that they might find out on their own never occurred to either of you. Some of this mental activity may show on the outside, but I’m not sure. They are both studying your face, your mother because she still can’t believe you’re trying to pull this off and Teacher because she wants to watch you sweat. Finally she takes your hand. You feel the new tension there as she says firmly, “Tell us what happened, Helen.” But you surprise everyone, even yourself. You shake your free hand in the air as if you’re wearing bells on every finger, and say, “It’s silly. It’s just a silly mistake.” Then you break free of her and start waltzing around the room, fingering small objects here and there, smoothing a doily under a table lamp, fluffing the bouquet of flowers. You do a remarkable rendition of coy denial while the two of them look on, amazed. Teacher says, “I wouldn’t have thought it possible.” Your mother says, “My baby!” The anguish in her tone makes Teacher turn on her. “We can’t afford to get emotional now,” she snaps. Your mother adjusts herself in her chair, dabs her eyes with her crumpled handkerchief. “What shall we do?” she asks softly. “We’ll simply have to confront him with it.” Meanwhile, you’ve come to a standstill in your flounce around the room. You’re standing a little behind your mother’s chair. You know they are talking about you. You feel the telltale air currents, or you smell the breath that propels their words. You rest one elbow on the mantelpiece, trying to strike a casual pose, still stalling for time. With your free hand, you spell in the air, a careless, nonchalant question: “What are you talking about?” Then you allow your hand to fall and hang within easy reach of your mother. But they don’t answer. Your mother is not looking, and Teacher is deliberately ignoring you, perhaps because she feels she cannot trust herself to contain her anger. And why should they answer? You know what they’re talking about. You emit a strange breathy gasp that you hope sounds like light laughter, which makes them both look at you. Then you take up your mother’s hand and say, “Mr. Fagan and me? It’s just silly. He would never . . . he could never . . . he’s engaged to someone else.” “What?” your mother says after repeating your words out loud.


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74 Blind Rage

“Yes. He confided it to me. He’s engaged to someone else but must keep it a secret because the young lady’s family does not approve.” You have no idea where these words are coming from. You suspect they come from one of those romance stories Polly is fond of reading to you to pass the time on trains. You never really pay attention to those stories, but you think you’ve got the basic plot right. There’s always a disapproving family on one side or the other, always the need for secrecy. You’re hoping your mother, who occasionally dips into those magazines herself, will buy it. “Engaged to another girl?” Teacher says. She exhales a snort through her nose. She arches her eyebrows and tells your mother, “Ask her, ‘Who is this other girl?’” “I cannot say. I promised . . . ” Teacher lets out a groan, steps forward, and takes your hand. She positions it on her face to read so you can read her lips and enunciates slowly, “But the reporter saw your name on the license. Your name, Helen.” Then she flings your hand away and says to your mother, “You see what he’s done to her!” Your mother’s face is completely flushed now. She presses both hands to her cheeks and says, “Oh, I wish the Captain were still alive.” Teacher actually rolls her eyes at this, then repeats, “We’ll simply have to confront him with it. He’s probably waiting for it. He’ll deny it too at first,” she sighs wearily, watching you. “For the effect.” Her tone makes your mother even more uneasy. “What do you mean?” “I mean,” Teacher says, “there’s a script such men follow. First denial, then confession, then . . . ” She shrugs her eyebrows with dismissive disgust. “Then what?” your mother gasps, almost afraid to ask. You are still standing there between them. You know you flubbed your lie and are now at a complete loss. You can feel Teacher’s rage billowing out of her, and find yourself edging toward your mother for safety. Teacher stares straight at you, her eyes blazing, or glaring, or bulging (whatever it is eyes do), her jaw set, her lips pinched together. Then she looks at your mother again. “Extortion, of course. He’ll expect some sort of payment,” she says. “A lump sum, I’m hoping, and not a lifetime annuity.” “What?” your mother gasps. “Mr. Fagan? Surely not . . . ” You reach for your mother’s hand and ask, “What is she saying?” Your mother starts to respond, her fingers tentative, but suddenly you don’t have your usual patience for her lack of fluency, and you fling yourself forward, aiming where you know Teacher to be. You lift her hand from her


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side, and repeat the question, the knuckles and tips of your fingers tapping hard against her parched palm. But she does not answer. She pushes your hand away, speaking to your mother. “Of course. What else? What else do you suppose he expects?” “What are you saying?” your mother says. Despite her reservations about him, she has to believe he’s not capable of that. “What are you saying,” you also say aloud, which comes out as: “Wahd ah yoo dzaying?” They ignore you, so you reach for Teacher’s hand again, but again she pushes you away. As she did when she wanted to punish you when you were a child, she turns her back, strides away, and throws herself onto the settee. You follow her, guided by the momentum of her movements. You plop down beside her, but she folds her arms away from you, clasps her hands in her armpits. Undaunted, you spell into her face. “All right, it’s true. We are engaged. I love him and he loves me. I have a right to happiness, a right to marry the man I love. You can’t stop me!” But Teacher dodges your speaking hands, rocking her upper body from side to side so she can still speak around you to your mother. “What else would he want, a man like that? Why else did he come here? He came to take advantage of us, to exploit us.” She throws back her head and lets out a single syllable of bitter laughter. “Surely you don’t believe that reporter found this out on his own? If Fagan truly intended to marry her, he would have taken her away somewhere.” She unclasps one of her hands to wag a finger in the air. “Mark my words. That reporter was tipped off. It was a warning, Fagan’s way of letting us know he expects us to pay for his silence. Just think of the stories he could tell them if we don’t . . . ” Abruptly, a new sound escapes Teacher’s throat. When your mother looks, she sees Teacher’s hand over her mouth in an uncharacteristic posture of astonishment. She rises and moves swiftly back to your mother’s chair. She says, “Is it . . . is she . . . ?” Words elude her. She sputters, seems on the verge of a coughing fit, and steadies herself, laying a hand on the back of your mother’s chair. She leans toward her, as if to whisper. Then she straightens, and speaks the words distinctly, “Are we going to have to consult a physician?” At first your mother doesn’t get it. This has been the farthest thing from her mind. Then she too emits a gasp, and they both stare at you, sitting there, your hands in your lap now. And they both notice again that quality


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they saw when you came down the stairs. Despite your agitation, they still see it. You are, in fact, glowing. There’s a flush on your cheeks; but beyond that, there’s a luminosity around your head, your whole body. Their minds race ahead. Teacher’s counting months, weighing options. Is it better to get a shotgun and force the man to do the honorable thing, or . . . ? While your mother, tears flowing down her cheeks now, is recalling your infancy, before the fever, the sweet freshness of your body. An ache starts in her arms, her breasts. A baby? Good grief, Helen, a baby! Is this what you’re not telling me? I don’t know how I could have missed it. But now that I’ve gone through it, thought it through moment by moment, what else could it be?

Evening

I have to entertain the possibility that there was a pregnancy involved, even a baby. Helen Keller’s love child. There’s a headline for the tabloids. Here are some scenarios. Stop me when I get warm. 1. You had the baby sometime the following winter or spring. I could do the math. And there are facts to support this. You spent those months at your sister’s in Montgomery, out of public view. They could have found a doctor discreet enough, or better yet a local midwife who would be happy to keep her mouth shut for a fee. Or maybe you’d just have it with no one but your mother and Mildred attending. If there were no complications, this wouldn’t be a problem. Babies have been born without professional medical aid for thousands of years. And afterward, Mildred would take it to raise as her own. This would be planned in advance, of course. Everything would be staged, Mildred strapping on layer after layer of padding, taking to her bed, declining visits, while you hid out in your bedroom. 2. Or maybe Mildred wouldn’t or couldn’t do it. Maybe there was the fear that you, with your famous affectionate nature (which is what got you into trouble in the first place), wouldn’t be able to conceal the truth from the growing child. So it was decided that the child should be sent elsewhere, perhaps to some discreet private institution used to making such arrangements, used to veiling identities and leaving blanks in all the records. And maybe this was done without your consent. You pushed your final push and felt what had been a part of your body tear free, and felt even before


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they lifted it from between your legs the slick wriggle of new life. But when you reached for it, someone held you back, while someone else cut the cord, and someone else wrapped and whisked it away to someone waiting outside. Where did they take it, Helen? Do you even know? Did they comfort you with a story about some childless but affluent couple who could give it all the love and advantages it could possibly desire? And maybe you allowed yourself to be comforted by that story, or used that story as a shield against what could as easily have been the truth: that the baby left your body and was wrapped in an old blanket, nested in a laundry basket, and deposited on the doorstep of some public institution, a church, a police station, with nothing but a note pinned to its blanket, saying in a crude, unlettered hand, “Please take care of my baby.” 3. Or maybe you were not conscious at the moment of birth. You woke some time later, in a groggy, woozy state from whatever it was they had you inhale, to find Teacher spelling solemnly into your hand, “The baby died, Helen. The baby was born dead.” 4. Or maybe the baby was born dead. 5. Or maybe the pregnancy ended prematurely. There was a sudden pain, which made you hug yourself and double over. Then it made gravity shift, so the floor beneath your feet threatened to rush toward you, so your legs buckled, making your knees sink into the carpet. And then, inside, there was the feeling of something giving way, letting go, leaving you behind. 6. Or maybe the pregnancy ended by other means. Teacher would have known how to do it. Remember those four formative years at Tewksbury. Women talk, share their secret knowledge. And while the descriptions of the procedures might have made her shudder and vow to herself: “Never me,” she would have paid attention. She was constitutionally practical. She would have stored up this information for future use. 7. Or maybe it was your idea. Yes, you signed the marriage license, but maybe you thought better of it later. Or they convinced you to send him away and he was gone. Or he hadn’t bargained for a baby and left without being asked. So you said, “What am I going to do with a baby and no man? Teacher, you’ve got to . . . ” 8. Or . . . what exactly were you burning that night in Montgomery when your room caught on fire? 9. Or what, Helen? What?


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July 24 But if there was a pregnancy—aborted, miscarried, brought to term— I’ll never know for sure. I allow for the possibility. But now I’ll leave it alone. And now that I’ve interrupted myself, I notice that the scene I’m imagining is too melodramatic. I do you an injustice by assuming that of course you would be madly in love with the man, swept off your feet into irrationality. Naive, sensuous, romantic Helen, always driven by her emotions and sensations, easily led, easily had, easy-going Helen, gone on the first man who ever paid her any mind. Also, checking your own rather guarded account of the event, I notice that it was your mother who confronted you first, not the two of them together. And she was no pushover about it either. She never liked Fagan. She suspected his intentions from the start and saw Teacher’s hiring him as a sure sign that Macy’s departure had impaired her judgment. So she reads the story and storms into your room waving the newspaper. You are sitting by the window, combing out your hair. You are startled by the jolt of the door opening and the uncharacteristic heaviness of your mother’s step. You feel the breeze she makes with the paper, and smell the familiar scent of newsprint. You reach for it, reach for your mother’s hand, and ask, “What is it, Mother?” Her hands are shaking with such agitation that she is at first unable to get the words out. You reach for her face to read her lips, but she jerks her head away. Then, finally, she grabs your hand and spells into it, “What have you been doing with that . . . that creature, Helen?” “Creature?” you say. You don’t have to feign surprise. Creature? You scan your recent memory for some clue to what she means, but draw a blank. She drops into the window seat beside you, and you feel the rustle of the newspaper as she snaps it smooth and folds it open. Holding the paper awkwardly, she reads the relevant sentences into your hand. You feel an unwholesome warmth expanding outward from inside, inflating your body like a balloon. You are very devoted to your mother, but it’s been a long time since you’ve felt you needed to answer to her. There is so much about your life she does not understand. Your political opinions frighten her, and your decision to go on living with Teacher after her marriage challenged all her moral assumptions. You try to be patient; it’s natural for there to be such


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tensions between the generations. But when push comes to shove, your actions and decisions are in no way governed by her opinions. For want of anything better, you smile. “That’s silly,” you say. “It’s just a mistake.” Her eyes glare at the column of print until the words start to swim. “It says it right here. The man saw the license, saw your signature. He talked to the clerk. He . . . ” “It’s a mistake,” you say again. You drop the comb in your lap so you can stroke your mother’s hand as you speak. “Mr. Fagan and me? It’s just a silly mistake. You know how the papers are. You know how often reporters get things wrong.” “I’ll remind you, your father was a newspaper man,” she says sharply. “I’m not a fool, Helen.” You can tell by the tension in her fingers that this is the wrong approach. “I know that, dear,” you say, spelling very slowly, very soothingly, your fingers striving to slow the quick pulse you feel in her palm. “All I’m saying is that reporters sometimes are not as responsible as they should be. I know there are rumors about Mr. Fagan. He’s been living here since—how long has it been—the beginning of the year? It’s natural that someone should jump to the . . . .” Like many daughters, you underestimate your mother. She allows your words to trail off, then spells deliberately, “But your signature is on the license, Helen. Is it a coincidence, a forgery?” “I don’t know,” you say, your hand becoming petulant. You sigh. You have a lot on your mind: The last thing you need is this sort of aggravation. It must be an awfully slow news day for anyone to run such a story, you think. And it never would have happened if you and Fagan had simply gone off somewhere and found a justice of the peace, as you had wanted. But he worried that he’d be accused of abducting you. He was the one who had wanted to hold out for their blessing. Too bad neither of you bargained on the press getting involved. “It’s a mistake,” you repeat again wearily. You have no imagination for deception, so you stick to the one lie you have. “I don’t know how my name got on the license. It’s just a mistake.” Your mother is studying you now. She sees you, her daughter, thirty-six years old but still fresh and young-looking, in your pale blue dressing gown, your hair flowing down the front of your body like a scarf. Nothing shows


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on your face. You wear your usual expression, serene and smiling slightly. This makes her anger spike again. The least you could do is show a little anxiety, concern, something. She rises abruptly and says, “Well, we’ll see about that. I’ll ask him myself.” You’re on your feet too, holding fast to her hand to anchor her to the spot. “You can’t,” you say. You wince in advance at the embarrassment you will feel when he learns what a muddle you’ve made of this. But whose fault is that? you think. If you’d done things your way, you’d be married already. “He’s not here,” you say quickly. “He’s out. He won’t be back until eleven.” “What?” she whirls back to face you, her whole body quivering. “Has he been in to consult with you already? You’re not even dressed!” “Mother, please,” you say, barely able to withhold your frustration. “It’s 1916. It’s not like when you were a girl. Nowadays it’s perfectly respectable for . . . ” But your fingers grow limp. You don’t want this conversation to degenerate into another argument about her antiquated morality, and you don’t want to dissemble anymore. And she doesn’t want any more of your lies. “Well, Teacher then,” she says. “We’ll see what Teacher has to say about all this.” She yanks her hand out of yours, and rushes from the room, trailing her powdery scent and the thin spice of her anger. You are in her wake, more irritated with yourself for having botched things than fearful of Teacher’s response. You say, “Mother, please!” out loud, which comes out something like, “Mud-tah, pweeze!” without enough breath behind it to carry. Teacher is still in bed, where she will be all day. There is a folded cloth over her eyes. The blinds and curtains are drawn against the daylight, and the one lit lamp has a brown shawl thrown over the shade to mute the light. The air is humid and heady with menthol, camphor, and the myriad other chemical smells of the powders and elixirs she doctors herself with. At the commotion of your arrival, she lifts the cloth laboriously from her face and says, “What’s all this?” her voice feeble and querulous. Your mother, like everyone else in the household, can be intimidated by Teacher’s new invalidism. Not that it’s new, only that this latest incarnation has something operatic about it. You are right beside your mother in the doorway and feel her hesitate. You grab her hand and say urgently, “Mother, please. We shouldn’t trouble Teacher with this silly . . . ” But she is propelled by her own momentum and flings your hand away. She bran-


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dishes the newspaper high above her head, shaking it, making the crisp pages rattle. Then she brings it down in a sweeping arch and drops it on Teacher’s lap, saying, “There! Read for yourself. I told you something like this would happen if you brought a single man into this house.” Teacher stares at her. She lifts the paper slowly, painfully, as if it’s made of marble. Her free hand gropes for the nightstand. “I can’t . . . ” her voice grates in her throat. “My glasses . . . ” Your mother at first reaches for Teacher’s glasses nestled among the medicine bottles. But she is too impatient, and takes the paper back, flicking on the lamp on the nightstand so she can read the article aloud. Then she drops the paper in Teacher’s lap again, a repeat of her previous gesture, almost a show of triumph. You follow all this from the motion of your mother’s body, the breeze the paper makes in the thick air. You hover by the bed, pressing the side of your leg against the mattress so you can feel every telltale movement. Teacher sighs heavily. “What does Helen say?” Then she pats the mattress, and you sit gratefully beside her so she can say the question into your hand. You let out another of those odd gasps of pseudo laughter, which makes both of them start. Then you say aloud, “Idz tsillee.” Teacher shifts heavily in the bed. She finds her glasses, lifts the paper, and reads for herself, squinting painfully at the words. After what feels like an eternity, even to your mother who can see what she’s doing, she lets out a sharp snort, and with the paper still before her face, reads aloud: “‘Miss Keller’s signature was written in the crude square print commonly used by blind persons.’” She lowers the paper and blinks up at your mother, explaining, “You see? It can’t be Helen. Helen’s signature is not crude. I should know! After all the practicing we did.” Leave it to Teacher to be insulted by a criticism of her training of you. Into your hand she spells as she says aloud, “There’s nothing to this story is there, Helen?” “No,” you spell back and make the word with your mouth. You are so grateful she is not angry that you forget that the plan had been to tell her. The plan had been to ease her into acceptance of the engagement. Little by little, Peter had said, you were going to drop hints, enumerate the advantages there would be for you to be married, while simultaneously mentioning his many virtues, so that gradually it would dawn on her as her own


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idea. By denying it this way, you realize, you’re only making it harder on yourself, because now you will have to confess to a lie. “There, you see? It’s just a silly mistake,” Teacher says, aloud and in your hand. “We’ll have Mr. Fagan telephone later and have them print a retraction. They’ll probably dismiss the reporter.” Your stomach clenches at this. The thought that some innocent man may lose his job on your account makes you almost cry out. Which may be why Teacher said it. She is watching you intently. The balls of her fingers are gauging changes in the skin of your palm. She goes on, “Helen would not lie about something so important. Would you, Helen? You would never lie to me?” You feel a subtle tension coming into her fingers. She forms the words with a slow emphasis that underlines every syllable. The odd, gaseous warmth that had you all puffed up a minute ago now deflates, condenses into a dank shudder of fear. After nearly thirty years of almost constant contact with this woman, you thought you knew all her many moods. But this one feels new to you, new and dangerous. Even your mother, who is not such a connoisseur of Teacher’s many moods, detects something of it in her voice. She glances first at Teacher, then at you, then back again. “So you believe her?” she says uncertainly. “Of course I believe her,” Teacher says. “Helen would never lie to me.” The repetition of this statement makes you want to pull your hand away; but before you can, she clamps down on your wrist, pinning it there on the comforter. Your mother notices this movement, but cannot interpret it. She looks at Teacher’s face, trying to catch her eye. But Teacher’s whole attention is focused on you. You are completely immobilized, your body inclined toward her at an unnatural angle, your hand pinned in her grip. Seeing all this, your mother feels herself excluded, as she so often does. She feels effaced, utterly obliterated by the intensity of the connection between you and Teacher. She is used to this by now, but still resents it. She coughs and says, “So you believe . . . ” Teacher lifts her free hand to silence her, then whisks the air with it as if fanning away smoke. “You may leave us now,” she says, in that imperious way which still irks your mother, perhaps precisely because she has never known how to combat it. “Helen and I will talk about it now.” Your mother opens and closes her mouth. She turns to leave then turns back, wagging her finger at Teacher. “I want that man out of this house,”


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she says. “I don’t care what he has or hasn’t done. It just isn’t right. I want him to go.” Then she sets her teeth with resignation and leaves the room. You do not know what words were spoken between them, but you feel the door close and know you are alone with Teacher. In the same instant, she releases your hand and settles back into her pillows. For a second, you are completely at a loss. This new mood of hers eludes you. You no sooner have it in your grasp than it liquefies and trickles through your fingers. Can it be, you wonder, that she really does believe you? But no. She is waiting. The thick air is charged with anticipation, and you know she will not be the first to speak. You wait a second, then ten, then twenty. But you know she is better at waiting than you are. Finally, you find her hand and say, “How did you know?” “Ian told me,” she says calmly. Ian is the Russian boy she hired as a cook. He is yet another in the long string of misfits and charity cases who comprise your domestic staff. It’s hard to find qualified help willing to work for such an odd household, so you have come to expect that every housemaid you hire will have a baby in tow or one on the way. The chauffeur cannot change a tire and is superstitious about driving in reverse. Ian’s English is almost incomprehensible, and his cooking is equally hard to take. He does well when boiling potatoes and cabbage but has little inclination for other dishes. Still, he is extremely devoted to Teacher. He addresses her as “My Madame,” and bows whenever he sees her. She finds him charming and insists his English and cooking are improving. “Ian?” you say. “Yes, he says he saw you and Fagan together.” Together, you think, what does she mean? What exactly did he see, and when? Did he peep through a keyhole? There’s a small ripple of irritation with this. Peter’s the one with eyes and ears; what was he doing with them that he missed Ian lurking about? While you are thinking this, Teacher says, “But I didn’t need Ian to tell me what’s right in front of my eyes. I’m not blind, Helen. I’ve seen the way he looks at you.” This catches you off guard. It sends a shivery tremor through you, which is something like a giggle. You feel yourself become a girl again, fluttery and excitable—the sort of girl you never actually were. The feeling makes you long to ask her to describe what it is she has seen when he looks at you. What exactly happens in his face, his eyes, that lets her know for such a certainty what he feels?


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Teacher would know how to explain it. Teacher has such a gift for description. And though, as she says, she is not blind now, she used to be blind, so she knows exactly what blind people most want to know. So you long to ask her, to pump her for details. Then, in the next instant, you steel yourself against the longing. You know how she operates. This is a trap to get you to admit more than you should. She dangles this before you, but you must resist the temptation. So you leave the question unasked. You sigh. You say, “It’s not what you think, Teacher. It’s not as if we were going to run off without telling you. It’s just that we were worried about your health. We didn’t want to upset you.” You feel the sharp exhalation of air through her nose and know it’s a snort of derision, as she says, “Well, you did a splendid job of that!” She won’t give you a break. One minute she says she’s known for days, and now she’s pretending the news shocks her. You sigh again. “The point is,” you say, rather firmly for you, “I had hoped to explain it to you myself. I didn’t expect Mother and the newspapers to be involved.” “And what exactly were you going to explain to me?” she asks, her hand rigid with irritation, the boney balls of her fingers making lethal pulses of pain. “How you’re madly in love with this man? How you cannot live without him?” She grinds the words into your palm, sneering, smearing it with sarcasm. It makes you want to wash your hand. Now, though it’s the last thing you want to do, you find yourself remembering what she said about love all those years ago when you were a child and asked, “Isn’t it like the sun? Isn’t it like when the sun comes through the clouds and warms your skin, and your hair, and makes the green things grow straight?” And she said, “No, Helen. Love is the rain. It’s the cool when the clouds cover the sun. It’s the smell of ozone and the dry earth opening, and the hard spatter of raindrops.” You didn’t know it then, but this exchange of definitions revealed the fundamental differences between you. You were a child of privilege, with your house in the sun, your servants, your pretty dresses, your ponies and puppies. You could afford the luxury of romantic idealism, the belief that love should be nurturing and miraculous. But she had grown up in the original school of hard knocks. If she could harbor a notion of love at all, it could be only of a tougher variety, a matter of hard-won survival.


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Love, you think. The last thing you want to do is rehash that old argument. Still, remembering that childhood conversation makes you tender. You take her hand and cradle it in yours. You form words as gently as you know how. “Love is not the issue, Teacher.” I believe this is something you could say. You are a grown woman, not a sentimental child. You are also rational and deliberate. What you may or may not feel for this man is not necessarily what guided your thinking. Teacher snorts again, “You expect me to believe you didn’t talk about it?” You shrug. The shrug means, “The words we spoke are not important.” Since you won’t tell her, she goes on. “Oh, Helen! Don’t you know that he only wants you because you seem so unattainable. Once you’re attained, he’ll get bored and throw you over. Just like they all do.” This stings as it is intended to. It hurts you now, as it will hurt you in the years and years to come, that she is so quick to dismiss the possibility that this man, or any man, might actually feel something genuine for you. Is it really so hard to believe that someone might actually love you in earnest, might actually want you for yourself? You make a fist, retracting your fingers from contact with her. But you won’t let her rile you, won’t let her get away with it this time. What there is or is not between you and Peter Fagan is none of her business. You relax your hand and say calmly, “There are a lot of practical reasons for us to marry.” “Practical reasons?” she raps back. “Honestly, Helen, you are so naive. Of course there are practical reasons for him. Who is he? Nobody. He has everything to gain.” You have to smile at this. “It’s not as if I’m an heiress,” you say. “If money was what he wanted, he could do a lot better.” “Don’t take that tone with me!” she says, which is what she always says when she can’t concede to your logic. “You are a prominent public figure. You are in demand as a public speaker. I’ve heard the comments he makes about fees other lecturers make. Of course if we were crass, if we wanted to cater to . . . ” You flip her hand over to interrupt, “Teacher, he’s not like that. You know he’s not,” you say. Then you pause, sensing that she’s trying to get you off track. “We understand each other,” you say at last, firmly. “I didn’t discuss it with you because . . . ” “You didn’t discuss it with me because you knew I’d object,” she concludes. Her hands are as dry as new paper. She forms each letter as precisely


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as when she was first teaching you the alphabet. “And,” she adds, her words even slower and more deliberate, “you knew I’d be right to object.” It scares you when she gets like this. You feel the fear as a general queasiness and a tingle under your scalp. But you are tougher than she thinks you are. Or more accurately, she knows precisely how tough you are, but sometimes forgets because you are generally more inclined to keep the peace. “Is it marriage you object to,” you spell in slow, measured gestures, “or is it him?” This startles her. You feel it as a small quake in her hand. It’s a good question, Helen. For her to answer it directly, she will have to own up to some things. Because in the background of this conversation, there’s another man and another marriage: John Macy and her marriage to him and what it has meant to your life. But she does not have to answer the question as asked or show any awareness of the subtext you both know is there. She says, “What I object to is the fact that you feel you can bring this outsider into our life in this way, without showing me so much as the common courtesy of advance warning. I have to learn of it from the servants and a notice in the paper!” Her fingers have a tremor in them now. You know she could be faking this. In fact, you suspect she is. But fake or real, it is not a good sign. She’s not supposed to excite herself like this. You feel her breath coming short and shallow. Her circulation is bad, her heart is bad. “Teacher,” your hand says in hers, “if you would give me a minute, I could . . . ” Then your arms and your whole chest ache to embrace her. You are such a physical being, Helen. You have such faith in the power of physical contact to communicate what words fail to say. You long to stroke her hand, or comb out her hair, or massage her temples with eau de cologne, and talk this over calmly. But you know where this argument is heading. You’ve argued enough with this woman over the years to know that sooner or later, she will resort to her secret weapon, the one statement you have no answer for and no defense against. And sure enough, here it comes. She straightens her spine as if assuming the throne, and her hand in yours is not so much forming the words as transmitting the message like a jolt of electricity. “I sacrificed my life for you, and this is how you repay me?” She’s said this to you so many times and in so many different contexts, you’d think you’d be inured to it. But the words shut down all avenues of response. The words sacrificed and repay are especially brutal. They slice deep grooves into your palm, making the tender nerves there throb.


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She says it again. “I sacrificed everything for you. Everything. Where would you be without me?” You feel your heart swelling and throbbing against your ribs. You feel the sinuses behind your nose constrict. You taste tears in your throat— tears—when the last thing you want to do is start crying. You need to keep yourself together. You need to tell her once and for all that you know what she sacrificed, and that her question, “Where would you be without me?” is constantly on your mind. Where would you be? Or more to the point, where will you be? Because that’s the question now. You’re thirty-six. She’s fifty, and she’s not well. Her eyes are never going to get any better, no matter how many operations she has. And there are the headaches, the fainting spells, the fits of nerves. And now there’s this new respiratory condition that may or may not be tuberculosis. None of this will get any better. You’ve tried to bring in others to lighten the load—Polly, your mother, now Peter—but Teacher, not you, always finds fault in their efforts. She insists on proofreading everything, even when someone else has been through it twice. She’s gotten so querulous, so hypercritical, hypersensitive. She gets so miffed at the slightest show of disrespect from anyone. None of this is going to get any better, either. So the question of what you will do without her, or what you will do with this new, cranky, and delicate version of her, is constantly on your mind. It was the very question on your mind when Peter found you that day, seated at your typewriter, supposedly composing a new lecture, but in fact just sitting mulling this very question over and over in your mind. And he said, “Excuse me for presuming, but you seem sad, Miss Keller. Is something wrong? Is there something I can do?” You were so moved by the gentleness in his hand as he said this. You were moved by the simple fact that he said it, that he noticed, because most people see only your plucky cheerfulness, the perpetual smile on your face, as if you didn’t have a care in the world. You felt something warm and rich welling up around you. Like the ocean’s undertow, it swept you forward, toward him, urging you to give in to the sympathy he offered. So you fought the reflex to deny it and said, “Yes. I am sad. I’m worried about Teacher. I’m worried about what will happen . . . ” You balked at the word worried as if you didn’t know how to spell it. You were (and are) utterly unaccustomed to expressing anything the least bit negative. But he didn’t let you finish your sentence, as if he actually knew


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your mind. “I know,” he said. “I’ve noticed, and I’ve thought about that too. And I want you to know, Miss Keller, I want you to know that you can count on me. There is so much I’ll happily do for you, with you. I can help more with your writing. I can interpret for you at lectures. I can . . . ” He is younger than you and somewhat in awe. You are a famous person, after all. People fill lecture halls to see you. You correspond with presidents, renowned authors, distinguished men of God. He reads you their letters. That day, his respectful deference flattered you. He reminded you of a very earnest young dog. “Yes. Your work has been a great help,” you said. “But it’s not just work,” he said. “Miss Keller . . . Helen . . . ” Then it wasn’t so much his words as the way his other hand lightly slid up and down the sensitive skin inside your wrist, so that you lost touch with the words his other hand was making. “Helen, I want you to know, you don’t have to go through this alone.” And in your mind, you were way ahead of him. You were already typing the letter to Teacher, because you know you always do better expressing yourself in writing: “It’s not what you think, Teacher. I’m not leaving you. It’s a way for us always to be together. I know it didn’t work with John, but it could work with this man. I promise it will. It’s a way for me to take care of you, and let you rest and be happy after all these years, after all you’ve sacrificed.” You even planned to use that word first so she couldn’t use it against you. This was the plan. You could laugh at yourself now, you could kick yourself—as if you can ever plan on anything with this woman. Nevertheless, you say some of these things now, in some form or other. You are careful to leave out the fact that he said, “I love you,” and that you may have even said it back to him. You are only human. You are capable of loving more than one person at a time, and also of calling something love that might not really be love. Your motives are only as murky as the next person’s, your desires only as convoluted as those of any other human being who’s ever said the words “I love you.” You are not going to rehash that old argument now. You are determined to present the case to her as a practical solution to a problem. You are sure you can make this work, keep everything balanced, keep everyone happy. “I’ve explained everything to him,” you say. “He understands how things are between us.” You are spelling a hundred words a minute, desperate to


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get all the words into her hand before she can respond. “He understands this. He accepts this. He knows he can never be to me what you . . . .” “It didn’t work with John, why should it work with this man?” she says, bringing his name into it at last. “After everything that happened with John, you should know better. I never should have let you talk me into marrying him.” You wince at this—yet another thing that suddenly turns out to be all your fault. “Marrying John was the worst mistake we . . . ” “But we’ve learned from that mistake,” you say. “With John, the problem was that we weren’t completely honest. Peter is different. He understands how things are. I believe he . . . ” Suddenly, her hand skitters away from yours, and the bed rocks violently beneath you. You feel the hot, irregular puffs of her coughing, and the spasmodic rocking of her body. Her arms flail helplessly, one hand grasping your shoulder, then releasing it. Deftly, you reach out to the nightstand, select a vial from the collection, and find the folded cloth she’d had on her forehead. You yank out the bottle’s stopper and tip some of the contents onto the cloth. The fumes make your tear ducts constrict, and you hold your breath as you press the cloth to Teacher’s nose and mouth. You draw closer, stroking her throat with your free hand until the fit finally passes. You do all this calmly, expertly. This is how your arguments always go now. It used to be that she would reach this point then lose all ability to censor her words. She could say such hateful, hurtful, horrible things, you learned not to remember them afterward. She could make you cry, wish you were dead, wish she’d never come into your life. But when the storm passed, she would always apologize, pat her hair back into place, and say, “I don’t know what got into me.” Now, everything is different. Now she collapses into a spasm of coughs, or she holds her head and rocks from side to side, emitting a high wail piercing enough that you can feel it in the bones of your face. Not that you would accuse her of using her various maladies to manipulate you. But you accept the fact that this is the shape your life together is taking. Her hand touches yours. You withdraw the cloth from her face. She takes it from you and folds it neatly. You return the vial to its place on the nightstand, careful to check that none of the other bottles are overturned. You fold your hands in your lap. Your brows bear down over your eyes, and you press your lips together. Part of you still believes you could make her understand the plan you had. You could explain it to her if she


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would simply give you half a chance. Then you sigh, reach for her hand, and say, “Tell me what to do, Teacher.” “Here’s what you must do,” she says. “You will tell him that it is not to be. It doesn’t matter what you tell him. Say you don’t love him. Say you don’t want to ruin his life. Say whatever you like. It doesn’t matter. Then you will go to Montgomery with your mother.” Your hand jumps at the mention of your mother. She feels this and says, “Yes, your mother will be a problem.” She drums her fingers in your palm, thinking, then says, “Here’s what we’ll do. For now, we’ll maintain the pretence that there was nothing between you and Fagan. Otherwise, she’ll want to take some action. I must say I’ve never seen her so agitated. Then later, when you’ve been in Montgomery for a suitable interval, you can tell her the truth. Confess everything, and let her feel like she’s dragged it out of you. It will make her feel more involved. As for me, we’ll pretend I know nothing. We’ll pretend you had the good grace to spare me the truth. She always likes it when she knows something I don’t.” You take all this in with some anxiety. You don’t like lying to your mother, and as we’ve seen, you’re not very good at it. You’re not sure you could feign a confession convincingly. Also, the scheme seems unnecessarily complicated, but you know better than to quibble. She goes on: “So you and your mother will go to Montgomery, and I will go to Lake Placid with Polly. He can go wherever he likes. No doubt he will object, will write to you. You must not write him back. You may read his letters if you must, but you must burn them afterwards. Eventually he’ll stop bothering you. No man waits forever.” “He would wait,” you think but do not say. “He would wait for me.” Before you can stop it, the bravado in these words summons the remembered sensation of his body. He was so tender, so tentative, so different from John, but thrilling too in his own way. It’s unfair, you think, as the memory recedes, especially since you know you could make it all work. It’s unfair that you have to give this up, have to sacrifice this for her too. You shake this off and ask, “But when will you . . . when will we . . .?” “Never mind,” she says. “Just get rid of him. Make it end. When you’re sure it’s all over, then we’ll decide what to do.” You feel the threat in her words. She’s actually opening up the possibility that you might never be reunited. You even feel the jolt of fear this threat would normally produce, but at a distance, muted. You wish, after all these years, you could have a quarrel that didn’t end this way. You wish


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you could say, “You don’t have to threaten me, Teacher. You and I both know we’ll always be together.” It is the fundamental truth about your life: You and Teacher will always be together. You can’t explain it, can’t even say for sure if it’s the best thing for either of you. But it is a fact that will always be true. After a while, her hand moves in yours and she says, “It will take me a long time to get over this.” Her fingers jerk in your hand like a sulky boy kicking a can. But it’s no idle threat; it will take a long time. And you don’t have to be clairvoyant to know how it will be. You will have to sweat it out, month after month in exile in Montgomery, languishing in the benevolent but narrow provincialism of your sister’s life there—the church functions, the tea parties, the garden club. Teacher will start out at Lake Placid as planned, but soon she will feel slighted by another patient or another patient’s blueblood family member. Or maybe one of the doctors there will suggest that what she has is not, in fact, tuberculosis and she will leave in a huff, pack off to Puerto Rico, of all places, where the warm sun and humid breezes will affect a miraculous cure. She will write you long letters, calling Puerto Rico her “isle of joy,” exclaiming over the restorative power of the exotic scenery, the friendly natives, the attentive care of Polly, all without mentioning anything about her plans to return. You will read between the lines of these letters, know that each one is telling you, “This is the wonderful life I could have had. See all I have sacrificed for you.” It’s ludicrous of course, because you’re the one footing the bill for her tropical idyll. But you get the message. You will know that this prolonged separation is meant to tell you what your life would be without her. You will feel the message repeated, a refrain to your round of daily activities, so that with every floral arrangement you’re called upon to praise, every baby you’re asked to pet, every slice of cake you’re urged to sample, her unspoken message will come back to you as a sting in your palm, a twitch in your fingers: “This is my life without Teacher.” You miscalculated. You underestimated how much it would hurt her that you came up with this plan on your own. As she gets older, you will have to keep this in mind. You press her palm flat against yours, then squeeze her hand between both your own. Then you reach out to touch her face. But you feel her face of thirty years ago. Your touch remembers how when you were little and committed some infraction of her rules, she would show her disapproval by making you touch her scowling face.


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“Helen is naughty. Teacher is sad,” she would spell to you. And it was the worst thing she could do to you, worse than when she slapped or spanked you, far worse than any of the battles you used to have before you learned words. You found yourself completely helpless, desperate to make amends, to make the lines of her face soften into a smile again. “Teacher glad,” you would spell desperately, insisting, pleading, “Teacher glad.” And you would do whatever it was she wanted, correct whatever wrong you had done. How did she get you to do that, you wonder now. How did she make herself matter to you more than human beings generally matter to each other? Mother, lover, child—nothing else compares. You drop your hand back into hers and say, “Yes, I know. I know.”


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part three

Working the Pump October 15 What am I up to, Helen? I know you’ve probably grown tired of asking yourself this question. It’s bad enough that I’ve read every word you ever published, and every biography ever written about you, and that I bore all my friends with tidbits of Helen Keller trivia. But now, I find myself spending endless hours speculating about the truth behind the facts of your life, wondering what really happened. I extrapolate, I read between the lines, I out-and-out fictionalize. In my defense, I say, what else can I do? When I read factual accounts (both yours and others’) of your life, so much is missing. I feel a need to fill in the gaps, to connect the dots. But when I read what I’ve written (I can’t believe the time I spent this summer writing it all down), I doubt I’ve gotten any closer to the truth, if truth is even what I’m after. By the way, you’ll be glad to know (maybe not) that your most recent biographer allows for the possibility that you and Peter Fagan might have had sex, because in your left-leaning circle, Free Love and rebellion against Victorian mores were advocated. But this biographer denies the possibility that you might have had sex with John Macy or Teacher or anyone else. It’s not that I’m obsessed with your sex life. In fact, I can accept the idea that whatever sexual feelings you might have had—for Macy, for Fagan, for Teacher, or whomever—may never have been expressed physically. That happens; people don’t have to act on every sexual impulse they have. I worry the point to counteract all the people who throw up their hands in horror and say “Not Helen Keller, not . . . sex!” I mean, somebody’s got to stand up for you. The other thing that gets to me is the way your biographers and others take everything you ever said or wrote on the subject as the absolute truth without allowing for the possibility that you might have been fabricating, 93


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prevaricating, even out-and-out lying. For instance, there’s the famous conversation you had with A. G. Bell that you recorded in your 1929 memoir, Midstream, when he told you that you should get married. He says, “It seems to me, Helen, a day must come when love, which is more than friendship, will knock at the door of your heart and demand to be let in.” And you say that love “is like a beautiful flower which I may not touch, but whose fragrance makes the garden a place of delight just the same.” First of all, who talks like that, Helen? I know, I know—people used to talk better than they do today. And you would consider it your prerogative to pretty up the dialogue for publication. But leaving that aside, it occurs to me that you may well have said something to this effect, but you may have been concealing, for example, that you and Teacher and John Macy (the conversation was occasioned by their marriage) were living some sort of ménage à trois. Or else you wanted to conceal the true nature of your relationship with Teacher. Bell was an old man, and you wanted to shield him from facts he would find unacceptable and distressing. Or else, no such conversation took place, and you invented it to . . . what? To put to rest suspicions some might have had? To soften the memory of Bell’s more virulent eugenicist beliefs? You had many reasons. But I get ahead of myself. The point is this: My basic gripe with you (though after everything we’ve been through together, the gripe is not nearly as pressing as it used to be) has to do with the Helen Keller Myth— you with your perpetually cheerful, never complaining, triumphing-overadversity demeanor. Helen Keller as the symbol of the buoyancy and fortitude of the human spirit. Helen Keller as the source of inspiration. Now, you might argue that you cannot be held responsible for the use others make of your life story. And you’re right up to a point, if only you hadn’t played such a big role in the creation of that myth. To put it another way, I want to discuss your work as a writer, the self you created through your writing, your motives for writing what you did, etc. That’s what I want to get into now. October 17 As I’ve already said some months ago, it was writing even more than the manual alphabet that was Teacher’s biggest gift to you. There you were, seven years old, discovering the pleasures of putting your self onto the page.


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What a joy, you thought, that these marks I inscribe represent me, my thoughts, my experiences, my personality. And you learned instantly that you had enormous control over the way that self came out. Depending on how you worded things, and what you included or left out, that self could take a radically different form. This is not to say I think you ever wrote anything, as a child or an adult, which was not factually true. But I think you understood the way you could manipulate language to shape the self you were forming to an ideal you had in mind. Not only you, of course. Behind you, looking over your shoulder, was Teacher. She stuck her finger on the page before you and said, “You need a comma here,” or “This sentence needs a verb,” or else “This paragraph doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t follow from what you have before. You should leave it out.” All of this she had a right to do, of course; she was the Teacher after all. It was her job to teach you the rules of grammar and composition. But she also had a lot at stake in the self you were constructing. You were her achievement, her creation. She had much to gain and much to prove with you and the way you presented yourself. She, with her checkered past, the dead mother, the wastrel father, the years in the almshouse, the charity case education. You were her last chance, her only hope. So naturally it was not enough that she managed merely to educate you. She had to transform you from the bestial savage she first found into a child so perfect, so angelic, so tirelessly industrious, so perpetually cheerful that it boggled the mind of everyone who contemplated you. She said, “This sentence sounds too cranky. Cut it out,” and “The wording here is too childish.” You thought, “It’s childish because I am a child,” but shrugged and changed it anyway. You believed Teacher was always right. And it was not just Teacher. When John Macy edited The Story of My Life, he did more than simply arrange the essays you’d already published into a linear narrative. I imagine the three of you bent over his desk in his cluttered Harvard office. You find the work thrilling. It is thrilling to have this lively, handsome (everybody says so) and very male man engaged in the very intimate act of editing your prose. Every time he spells into your hand (he gets more fluent every day), it makes your skin tingle and your head swim so you can barely concentrate on what he’s saying. And then there’s the way Teacher is around him. You wear a small smile as you stand behind her chair, inhaling the new perfume that wafts up from her hair and feeling the new tremors


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in her hand as she spells to you. You notice the way their faces almost touch as they lean forward. All this makes you perhaps more compliant, more acquiescent than you might otherwise be. John says, “You need to expand this part at the end of Chapter Three.” “Expand?” you say both because you’re uncertain what he means, and because you like it when he touches you. “Yes, you know,” he says. Then he twiddles his fingers above your palm searching for the words. “Expand. Add more detail. You want to prepare your reader for Miss Sullivan’s arrival in Chapter Four.” “But that’s all I have to say,” you protest feebly. “Dr. Bell told my father to write to Perkins, and he did, and then Teacher came. That was all that happened.” Teacher watches the words your hands make. She takes your hand firmly and says, “Just try, Helen.” So you go to the typewriter in the corner and pound out a new paragraph. When you come back, they’ve advanced to chapters nearer the end. John is saying, “There are some sections here where your tone gets a little preachy.” Teacher agrees. “You sound like Little Lord Fauntleroy,” she says. You feel the air ripple with their laughter. You feel miffed because they’re ganging up on you. And also because you liked that book. Fauntleroy was one of your early role models. Aloud to Teacher, John says, “What do you think about this part in Chapter Twenty, this rant about having to analyze literature. Don’t you find it a bit sophomoric?” When she repeats this into your hand you think, “Well of course it’s sophomoric. I am a sophomore.” Teacher cocks her head from side to side, then says, “Maybe we should leave it in. It makes her seem more genuine.” “But if it isn’t good, shouldn’t we take it out?” you ask. Good is the whole point, you’ve always thought. Not just good, excellent, A+, one hundred percent. Where does she get this “more genuine” stuff? After all, she’s the one who will never let you forget when you graduate cum laude, and not magna or summa. Then he brings up the subject of the “Frost King” incident again. He says, “If you include your own account, no one can bring it up against you. If you leave it out, you can be sure someone at Perkins will bring it up.”


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“I don’t want to,” you say. After a minute, Teacher says, “Maybe Mr. Macy is right.” You start and draw back from her. Yesterday she was on your side. “I don’t want to write about it. I don’t even like to think about it. It’s my book. I should be the one to decide.” “Don’t be so melodramatic, Helen,” she says without speaking your words aloud for John. “All you have to do is write down the facts.” Then she smiles at John and continues speaking aloud to him as she spells to you, “Mr. Macy is a professional editor. Surely he knows best.” “Or I could write it up as an independent observer,” he says. So that’s what happens. He goes to the library to get a copy of Canby’s book, and Teacher rummages through her papers and finds a battered old Braille copy of your story. You’re surprised she still has it. Why did she keep it all these years? When she reads your story to John, he thumps the desk and laughs with pleasure. “Helen’s is much better, more succinct, less didactic,” he says. “That opening description with the polar bears, the bit about King Glacier—brilliant!” Teacher repeats all this to you because she can see you’re still upset, but his praise does not console you. “People will only wonder who I stole that from,” you say. What consoles you is what he writes about you. He adds a long “Supplementary Account,” with chapters about your education, your speech, your literary style, your personality, to fill out what would otherwise be a very slim volume. You find it utterly enthralling. First, there is the thrill of the fact that this intelligent and handsome man, whom you have not even known all that long, has made all these observations about you. But beyond this, you are pleased by the way his portrait of you enlarges and enhances your portrait of yourself. He makes you seem rather more witty, a little less mawkish. And you are amused, in an almost vengeful way, by the delicate negotiations between John and Teacher as he tries to persuade her to let him include excerpts of her letters and journals. She’s happy to include all your letters, all the adorable scribbling of your early years, which she has preserved as lovingly as your mother would have done had Teacher not hoarded them all. They were part of her historical record, she claimed. But she is guarded about her own writings. She says, “Not that one! I sound too arrogant. And here I’m too flippant.”


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“No, you don’t,” he cajoles. “You sound excited, you sound proud of yourself, which is only as it should be. It will give the reader a feeling of immediacy, a sense of how you felt when these events were taking place.” Most of the events are familiar to you—the dining room battles, the pump scene. These are stories that everyone repeats. Then there are a few stories that are less familiar, people’s names you’ve forgotten, trips, and visits and meetings you have no memory of. It is strange reading these accounts, recognizing and not recognizing yourself as she writes about you. Getting her to relinquish excerpts from her journals is even more of a struggle. She reads him sections but won’t let him read it himself. She won’t even let him touch it. You know all about this. You remember vividly the first time you discovered her writing in her journal. You were probably about eight. You said, “What are you writing?” “Just some thoughts,” she said, “Just some things I thought about today, some of the things we did together.” “Read it to me,” you said. “No.” This was a shock. She never refused to read to you. The one thing you could always count on with Teacher was that she would always read to you. “Read it to me,” you insisted, assuming she must have misunderstood. “No,” she said again, pushing your hand away gently and continuing to write. You were so startled, so baffled by this refusal that you did not respond as you might have once. You neither tore the page and wrestled the book out of her hand nor overturned the inkwell. In your perplexity, all you could do was ask, “Why?” “Because it’s private,” she said. You had no answer for this, no follow-up question. Private? You knew what the word meant, but what did she mean by it now? What could she have to write that she wouldn’t share with you? You are together every minute. She said herself she was writing about the things the two of you had done together. Why would she want to keep that from you? So the diary has long since been a source of, if not tension between you and Teacher, at least perplexity on your part. You know she continues to keep a journal. In every apartment and house you live in, you know exactly where she keeps it. Sometimes, when you’re alone, you go into her room, put your hands on it, even open it and run your fingers over the pages, feel-


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ing the marks her pen has made (she writes with a heavy hand), smelling the ink, counting the pages that are full and the pages that are blank. For a while after John moves in, you consider showing it to him and asking him to read it to you. But you know this would be a betrayal. Much later, when you are contemplating writing a book about Teacher, you ask her to read it to you. You frame the question in the most casual way, careful to disguise the childishly burning curiosity you still feel about it. But she refuses flatly, without explanation. Then one strange day, you find her sitting in front of the fireplace. When you touch her, you find she has her journal in her lap. Methodically she tears a page from it, crumples it into a ball, and throws it into the fire. “What are you doing?” you ask. “There are things I don’t want anyone to read. I don’t want them to find their way into print after I’m gone.” It hurts you that she thinks you would be so careless of her wishes. You grasp her by the wrist and say, “You know I would never let that happen. You know I would never let anyone print anything private.” She twists her hand out of your grasp, tears out another sheet, and tosses it onto the flames. “It may not be in your control,” she says. When did this happen, and where? Wrentham, Forest Hills? I don’t remember where I read it; I’ll have to look it up. I know you wrote about it somewhere, though the dialogue is all mine. By the way, Helen, it startles me that you did not learn the facts of Teacher’s life until you were almost fifty. You knew the basic outlines—the early years on the farm, her mother’s death, her blindness, her brother Jimmy’s death, the salvation of the transfer to Perkins. She’d even alluded to her father’s desertion and some of the horrors of the almshouse at Tewksbury. But your information was sketchy, and you never really questioned her about it all. I suppose every child has a hard time imagining the early lives of parents and other grown-ups. To you, Teacher did not exist before March 3, 1887, when she first arrived at Ivy Green. Later, when you were old enough to be more curious, you discovered that she was not forthcoming, to say the least. She evaded and deflected personal questions or flat-out refused to answer them. Still, it strikes me as odd that you were not more persistent. Was it simply one of those things you did to keep the peace? Then, one day sometime in the late ’20s, she announced to you that you needed to know the story of her early life. A young editor, Nella Braddy


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Henney, had come into your circle and was interested in writing Teacher’s biography. Teacher said she wanted you to hear the story first. This must have struck even you as odd, Helen. Nella was your friend; if Teacher didn’t want her to write about that period of her life, she had only to tell her. Why not simply print the same sanitized summary of those years that had always been included in newspaper articles and interviews? It wasn’t as if Nella was bent on digging up the dirt on Teacher, was it? In typically dramatic fashion, Teacher waited to tell you until the two of you were alone in the house; she even made the dogs go into another room. Then she sat beside you and told you the story. It was like something out of Dickens, you thought, and found it utterly enthralling. And it all made sense. You understood how those early traumas and privations had shaped her personality. Still, at the back of your mind, you must have been wondering why she was telling you at that particular moment. You had the feeling that she was trying it out on you before she had to try it out on her biographer. By this, you did not mean that there was anything factually untrue about the story, that she was practicing a lie. That possibility occurs to me, but not you. And it was not as if she wanted or needed a response from you. Rather, you sensed she was rehearsing it simply to determine how hard it was to finally get the words out, to release her secrets after so many years. This led you to wonder why it had to be a secret at all. And when she was done speaking, you told her that you thought people would admire her all the more, as you did, for knowing all that she survived during her early life. She said nothing to this. She seemed exhausted, spent. Her hand hung limp off the arm of her chair. Then, you felt her emit a quick snort of hot breath. You didn’t touch her face to check, but you suspected she was wearing that tight-lipped expression that means, “Oh, Helen, people are not as open-minded and warm-hearted as you always want them to be.” October 19 But Teacher’s story is not our concern here. Yours is. Also, the conscious effort you, as a writer, employed to create that story. But, as I’ve told you, Helen, whenever I read what you wrote about your life, I feel compelled to read between the lines. Surely you, with your imagination, understand


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how this happens. Admit it. You even invite it sometimes. For example, here’s what you wrote about the breakup of the Macy marriage: . . . Mr. Macy was considering leaving us. He had wearied of the struggle. He had many reasons for wishing to go. I can write about that tense period of suffering only in large terms. There is nothing more difficult, I think, than to reconstruct situations which have moved us deeply. Time invariably disintegrates the substance of most experiences and reduces them to intellectual abstractions. Many of the poignant details elude any attempt to restate them. It is not merely the difficulty of recapturing emotions, it is almost equally difficult to define attitudes, or to describe their effects upon others. They are, as it were, in solution, or if they do crystalize, they appear different to the persons concerned. It seems to me, it is impossible to analyze honestly the subtle motives of those who have influenced our lives, because we cannot complete the creative process with the freshness of the situation clinging to it. Analysis is as destructive of emotion as of the flower which the botanist pulls to pieces. As I recall the Wrentham years, they appear to my imagination surrounded by an aura of feeling. Words, incidents, acts, stir in my memory, awakening complicated emotions, and many strings vibrate with joy and pain. I shall not try to resolve these experiences into their elements.

Basically, you announce that you’re just not going to write about it. This is your right, I suppose, but why mention it at all? You allude to so much— “situations which have moved us deeply,” “poignant details,” “emotions,” “attitudes,” “effects,” “subtle motives”—without pinning anything down, though I suppose that anyone who has ever witnessed the breakup of a marriage has a pretty good idea. And then there’s the “struggle” John was weary of. What struggle? Normals would assume you meant the struggle of living with a deaf-blind person. I’m guessing you’re referring to the struggle of living with Teacher, or the struggle of living with you and Teacher, or . . . ? The other thing that strikes me is the way you insist that your memories of that period, even of the breakup, were not completely negative. You insist on “ joy,” not just “pain.” I sense Teacher’s presence in these words. Or rather, I sense your consciousness of her presence. You’re writing for two audiences—the unknown reader out there in the world, and also for Teacher, who reads everything you write before it goes out into the world. To the world you want to indicate that you have feelings about these events,


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which differ from Teacher’s feelings, but you will refrain from specifying out of loyalty to Teacher. At the same time however, you are sending a message to Teacher, saying, “I have not forgotten the difference we had about the breakup. I still feel now as I felt then. Know that nothing has changed.” I imagine her reading these words. I imagine you being aware of her reading these words. I imagine her saying nothing. I imagine you registering the fact that she says nothing, interpreting that failure to speak in whatever way you do. But I’m way out on a limb here. What were we talking about? The Helen Keller Myth and the role you played in creating it. So let’s look at your work as a writer, specifically as a writer of autobiography. Let’s stick to chronology for a minute. You published The Story of My Life when you were 23. People liked it, but I sense you felt dissatisfied. Despite the title, that book was only the story of your education, from your acquisition of language to your first year at Radcliffe. To Teacher, and others, your education was an end in itself, because most of the world believed it was impossible to educate someone like you. But you were only 23; you thought your life was only beginning. You believed that your education was a means to an end, that it should lead to something—a career as a writer. You had many social and political interests you wanted to write about. Also, you were writing poetry. You perceived this writing as making good use of the education you had received, and hoped it might benefit others in some way. But a lot of people had a hard time thinking of you as a real writer because they had doubts about the originality of your ideas. Critics quibbled with your use of auditory and visual references because you had no direct access to sights and sounds. They argued that your writing was at best merely a collaboration with Teacher, or at worst, that you were merely signing your name to the work of others. In 1908, you wrote The World I Live In (the book of yours I like the best) in part as an answer to this criticism. In it, you take a phenomenological approach, writing about quotidian experience— what touch really means to you, how you interpret smell, what your dreams are like, etc. You also explain how you think of words designating sights and sounds as analogous to other sensory experiences. So, for example, you associate different colors with different smells and textures. You also assert your right to use auditory and visual language because no special vocabu-


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lary exists to represent deaf-blind experience, and even if you could invent such a vocabulary, it would be incomprehensible to seeing-hearing readers. You hoped that The World I Live In would be the last book you would ever have to write about yourself, and that it could serve as a kind of gloss to help readers understand your future writing. But the quibblers persisted, policing your language and raising doubts. I can relate. The other day, I gave an essay of mine to a friend, and she jokingly accused me of “passing” as sighted because I mentioned a television commercial and a few visual details without mentioning that I cannot see. But I was not writing about blindness. I was not even writing about myself really. My reader didn’t need to know that I am blind. I understood that TV commercial even though I couldn’t see it. I wasn’t going to interrupt the essay to say, “Although I cannot actually see this commercial because I am blind, I had my aural impressions of it verified by a certified sighted person.” Another example: I was talking about a book I was reading and a friend said, “Don’t you mean listening to? Don’t you mean that you were listening to the book on tape?” Of course, this was literally true; generally speaking, I do most of my reading aurally. But I’m not going to say, “I’m listening to such-and-such a book on tape,” or “I scanned such-and-such a book into my computer so I could use its synthesized voice” when all I mean is that I am reading it. To specify the mode of access I happen to be employing implies that I have something to say about the particular mode, that the fact that I was listening to it (or touching it in Braille for that matter) significantly alters my understanding of it. Occasionally this could be true, I suppose. Mostly it’s not. It’s like I’m not going to say, “Later I will be in close proximity to you” instead of “See you later.” How literal-minded can people be? October 20 But you faced something worse than literal-mindedness. When you started writing on political issues—socialism, women’s suffrage, reproductive rights—critics attacked you for other reasons. They assumed people around you, John Macy and Teacher, were ghostwriting for you, using poor little defenseless and dependent you who, because of your afflictions, were by definition unable to form such opinions on your own. Or else they said


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that the fact that a deaf-blind person, who by definition had an impaired intellect, could hold such opinions was proof that the opinions were wrong. You responded to these criticisms as best you could. “I plead guilty,” you wrote once, “to the charge that I am deaf and blind. I have the advantage of a mind trained to think, and that is the difference between myself and most people, not my blindness and their sight.” It’s a good answer, Helen, full of bravado and challenge. You felt that you’d said enough about being deaf and blind, about your education, about the way you understood and used seeing-hearing language. You felt that you should be allowed to move on and write about all the other subjects that interested you. But the trouble was that you underestimated how hard it is for seeing-hearing people to get around your deafness and blindness. They had too much trouble trying to imagine a mind, trained or otherwise, that could not see and hear. Let me play devil’s advocate for a minute and look at your writing from their point of view. One of the many things that is imaginatively taxing about your daily life was your dependence on others to transmit information to you, to describe your surroundings, to transcribe the words of people who could not communicate with you directly, etc. This raises the possibility that others may have misinterpreted, misquoted, or abridged (unintentionally or otherwise) your words, and supplied other misinformation. So when you wrote about an event, you may have given an accurate account of what you thought was going on, but you had no way to verify it independently. In other words, you were presenting secondhand information as if it were firsthand experience. For the sake of argument, here’s a random example. It’s another event you record in Midstream, the chapter titled “I Capitulate.” I’m talking about the spring of 1913 when you and Teacher went to visit Andrew Carnegie at his home in New York to discuss the pension he wanted to bestow on you. When you write about this meeting, you do not merely summarize the conversation. You quote his words and your responses and provide a good deal of information that could only have come to you via Teacher. But how much of what you wrote are you absolutely, positively sure really happened? Let’s take a look. First of all, where did this meeting take place? I notice that you do not mention this. There’s no reason to mention it, I suppose, so I’ll assume you’re in the library, because Andrew Carnegie is associated with libraries.


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How do you know you’re in the library? You know because the servant who greeted you at the door said, “Mr. Carnegie will meet you in the library.” Teacher may have repeated these words into your hand, or else she may have said simply, “We’re going to the library.” Or else you know you’re in the library because Andrew Carnegie is associated with libraries, so it’s the logical place for him to receive visitors. But direct firsthand knowledge, Helen? All of the above is merely secondhand and hearsay. You know you’re in the library because libraries have a certain smell. You can smell the books. You smell the leather bindings, the paper and parchment, the ink, the glue. Print books smell different than Braille books, but just because you can’t read print doesn’t mean you aren’t familiar with print books. After all, people still read to you from print books. You own a good many print books, as do Teacher and John. Moreover, you know this is a big room with a high ceiling because like any blind person, you can feel space. The air moves differently in a big room. Hot air rises to the ceiling. If the ceiling is high, the air around your head is cool, even if the house is well heated. Perhaps before Carnegie joins you here, Teacher lets you walk the perimeter of the room, pacing off its dimensions, Perhaps you fingered the stuff of the drapes, caressed the upholstery, handled some of the objects on the tables. In fact, as you report, Carnegie makes a point of showing you his collection of ornamental boxes that were gifts to him from the many towns and cities where he built libraries. (“Showing?” the Normal reader objects. OK, so he put them in your hands and asks Teacher to describe what you could not detect through touch.) In addition to all this, you know firsthand (first-foot) that there is a large and expensive carpet on the floor because you’ve walked across it. Expensive carpets tend to be larger and thicker than cheap carpets. Teacher may have described its color and pattern, maybe not. Inside your shoes, you are twiddling your toes against the thin soles, wishing you could walk barefoot over this carpet. Does Teacher describe Carnegie’s appearance to you now, or will she save that for the taxi ride back to wherever you’re staying? That’s a part of blind experience too—the delayed description. When Nick and I come home from a dinner party, I question him about the other guests’ appearances and the features of the host’s home. I then add these details to my own experience of the event. Later, if I replay the event in memory, the information Nick supplies is a part of it, as if I was conscious of it while it was happening.


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But I don’t need to tell you how this works. You’re not sitting there thinking, “God, I wish I knew what Mr. Carnegie looks like.” You are thinking about other things. You are thinking that despite your socialist leanings, you like the feel and smell of rich people’s homes. You turn your head in a slow pan, so you can inhale deeply. You tweeze out the different threads of scent and savor each separately. There is the leather of the books. There is furniture polish. They use lemon oil and beeswax here, which is very pleasing. Now someone is bringing in the tea—orange pekoe—and trailing this, there’s the scent of lilac from the hall. There was a huge vase of lilacs on a round table in the marble entrance hall, which you inhaled rapturously, but Teacher wouldn’t let you touch them. The scent of these lilacs was especially remarkable to you because it’s too early for lilacs in New York, so they must have been shipped in from somewhere else or grown in a hothouse. Now this fainter trace of the scent makes you feel bad for the pleasure you took initially. To you, nothing denotes great wealth more vividly than the scent of out-of-season flowers. Teacher and Carnegie are engaged in small talk. Into your hand she drops an occasional word or two: “the weather . . . my health . . . his health . . . Mrs. Carnegie so sorry . . . an urgent engagement . . . send regards . . .” to let you know the general course of the conversation. At this point, you don’t need to know every word that’s spoken. You have learned that a great deal of human speech is formulaic, and you accept the fact that Teacher would find it too fatiguing to spell out each word, even though she is capable of doing so. They get on to the topic of your lectures and your work as a writer (you have started your career as a public speaker), and Teacher’s transcription becomes more complete. Mr. Carnegie has never attended one of your lectures, but he’s heard accounts from others. “What is her topic?” he asks. Teacher spells this question to you, and you spell back the answer, even though she could tell him herself. “Happiness,” she says out loud. “Yes, yes,” he says, “A splendid topic. Just the message we need today. Enough gloom and doom. There’s plenty of happiness in the world if people would just look for it.” Teacher transcribes this all to you. When she wants to, she can spell close to a hundred words a minute, so there’s barely any delay between his speaking and your receiving. You say, “Has he read Optimism? Tell him I’ll send him an autographed copy for his collection.”


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She brushes your palm with her index, her sign that means either “not relevant” or “not now.” You accept this dismissal because you have no choice. You could try to say your words out loud, but you haven’t had time to do your vocal exercises today and don’t trust your voice. Out loud, Teacher is describing your standard lecture to him. She explains that it is she who does most of the talking. She usually begins the lecture with a detailed description of your education and her own teaching methods. Then you and she demonstrate the finger alphabet. Then you recite the “Happiness” speech out loud, which she repeats in her own sonorous voice for those members of the audience who find your speech incomprehensible. She fails to mention that your speeches now have a more overt political content. Now, for instance, you talk about factory working conditions and child labor. Carnegie says, “Very uplifting, very inspirational. Yes, we can’t say too much about the value of education.” Then suddenly he frowns. “But what’s this I read in the paper last week? Helen Keller—a socialist? It was right there in the headline. They quoted some nonsense, from a letter she supposedly wrote in support of that mill rabble up in Lowell.” He wags a threatening finger at her. “If that were really true, I’d take her over my knee and spank her. You tell her that.” Teacher transcribes this statement in its entirety, adding “You should see the look on his face, the old devil,” then cautions, “Keep smiling.” Out loud she trills a laugh, “Oh, Mr. Carnegie!” You tell Teacher, “Tell him that socialist ideals are not far from his own. He believes in the brotherhood of man, peace among nations, education for everyone. All these are socialist beliefs.” There is a pause before she speaks. Your hands are still touching so you know this. There’s a certain tautness that comes into her arm when she is speaking, a signal you learned to recognize years ago. You know that she sometimes has to paraphrase or summarize your words and assume that this is why she’s pausing now. Finally, she tilts her head to one side and smiles confidingly. But she says, “You know how the newspapers distort things, Mr. Carnegie. Helen has many ideas that are easily misinterpreted. What some might perceive as socialism is really only her wish to do good for others. Helen is a natural philanthropist as you know.” If you knew she was saying this, you would feel betrayed. But Teacher knows what she’s doing. She may sense that Carnegie, like others who know you, holds John Macy responsible for the socialist beliefs you express. She


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may also sense that he has heard the many rumors about trouble in her marriage. She noticed how he discreetly avoided addressing her as either Mrs. Macy or Miss Sullivan. And she may deem it best, if not to confirm the rumors, at least to distance herself and you from Macy’s politics. Whether or not this is on Carnegie’s mind, he leaves Macy out of it. He furrows his brow and wags his finger at her again. “It’s your job to ensure that people don’t make that mistake,” he says peremptorily. Then he turns as the door opens to admit his daughter, Margaret. It’s a timely interruption. It keeps him from seeing the look on Teacher’s face. She does not take kindly to having her duty described to her. Mr. Carnegie beams as he introduces his daughter, saying, “Margaret is the philanthropist here. She is the good fairy that whispers in my ear that I must make somebody happy.” When Teacher transcribes this you say, “Philanthropy! Tell him that philanthropy is a tragic apology for the wrong conditions people have to live under.” “I will say no such thing!” her fingers snap back. You knew she wouldn’t, but you felt obliged to say something, to register a protest. You have already refused his offered annuity several times. He’s been urging it on you since 1910. Each time you’ve politely declined, saying that you prefer to earn your own living as best you can. There are other reasons, of course. Though he seems like a nice enough person and you admire him for his library project, given who he is and how he made his money, you hate the very idea of taking his charity. The crack about socialism doesn’t help either. It’s hard for you to sustain this irritability for long, however. In another minute, you give way to the pleasant aromas of the tea tray. You wish Teacher would describe Miss Carnegie and what she’s wearing, but you know you will have to wait until later. You take the tea cup she offers and find it a joy to hold. The china is so exquisitely smooth and light, the cup’s handle has such an elegant crook to it. You inhale the flowery fragrance of the tea and think that in a perfect world, everyone would know the pleasure of fine china. In your hand Teacher warns, “Only one slice of cake, Helen. You don’t want to appear greedy.” But you know she’s worried about your weight. She should talk, you think, but don’t respond. Out loud you say to Miss Carnegie, “Da-ank yoo.” Miss Carnegie still has hold of the plate she’s handing you. You feel her start, almost dropping it in your lap. You suppose she is surprised that you


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can speak out loud. Many people are. In fact, it is the shock of your voice, Helen. It is unnaturally deep in your throat today. You sound like a drain gulping bath water. Mr. Carnegie is staring at you in horror. “Do you let her do that in public?” he asks. Teacher glances nervously at you, then smiles at him. “Helen has not had time to do her vocal exercises today. When she speaks in public, she rehearses extensively beforehand. Her voice is not always intelligible, but audiences seem to find it very affecting.” She says none of this to you. You are busy with your cake, and she knows you are very sensitive about your speech. The last thing she wants to do is have you start sulking. She shows Mr. Carnegie her most winning smile. “It was Dr. Bell who encouraged Helen to develop her speaking voice,” she tells him, using the inventor’s name as a seal of approval. “Dr. Bell believes that the deaf should . . .” “Dr. Bell!” he scoffs, interrupting. “Yes, yes, the man’s a genius. I won’t deny that. But his views are not always sound.” “What’s he saying?” you ask Teacher, giving your fork a rest. “We’re talking about Dr. Bell,” she tells you. You emit a little chirp of pleasure, aim your face in Carnegie’s direction and smile fatuously. Carnegie sees this and looks back at Teacher. “You have to be careful. Her voice is well . . . you don’t want to make her appear ridiculous.” Teacher nods and says nothing. It’s not the first time she’s heard this criticism, and she’s tired of it. But she knows better than to argue now. Instead she turns her attention on Miss Carnegie and makes some elaborate compliments: “. . . everything is so lovely, so tasty, so exquisite . . .” To you, Teacher says, “Smile at the girl. She’s to the right of her father. Eleven o’clock to you.” You swivel your head the correct increment, smile and nod. “What’s she wearing?” you ask. “The latest from Paris, I shouldn’t wonder. But she’s not at her ease. She looks like she’d rather be on a horse,” Teacher tells you, though neither comment really helps. Out loud she says, “Helen says to tell you she’s never tasted such fine cake.” Miss Carnegie leans toward you, then stops, glances at her father, then at Teacher. She straightens, more flustered than ever, and finally says, “Thank you. Please tell her ‘thank you.’ I mean, she’s very welcome. Tell her . . .” Carnegie interrupts, “How much are you charging for tickets to these lectures of yours?”


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“A dollar and a dollar fifty for the better seats,” Teacher says. “Too much, far too much!” he says. “You would make more money if you sold them for fifty cents, not more than seventy-five cents as a limit.” Teacher relays this advice to you, and you turn your head to smile at him. But you feel a bit miffed. Is he saying you’re not worth a dollar? Teacher, however, is interested. She leans forward, “Really? How so?” He explains it to her: “If you have 100 people paying a dollar each versus 250 paying fifty cents plus another fifty paying seventy-five . . .” He scribbles figures in a pocket notebook to show her. They talk about advertising, appropriate venues. Finally he concludes, “You want to draw in the working people—shop girls, office clerks, mill workers—the sort who want to better themselves. This is the audience you want to reach. Make them grateful for what they have and keep them out of the sway of those union thugs.” “What now?” you ask with some irritation. You hate it when she filters conversations to such an extent. You wanted to bring John along today so the two of them could take turns interpreting, but Teacher didn’t want to, and given John’s view of men like Carnegie, he probably would have refused. “Just more about your lectures,” she says, nodding sagely at the man. She observes Carnegie watching her spelling fingers, and tells him, “Helen is very grateful for your advice in this matter.” She laughs lightly. “I’m sorry to say it, but Helen really has no sense of the value of things.” This is true, Helen. It makes you wince slightly when she puts these words in your palm, but you have to admit it’s true. You are naive about money. Easy come, easy go—well, not quite. But you don’t give it a lot of thought. It’s only natural. You never wanted for anything growing up. And even though your income in the years since Radcliffe has been erratic, there’s always been someone to step in and tide you over between royalty checks and lecture fees. Carnegie joins in Teacher’s laughter. “Yes, a common failing of the young,” he says, shooting a mock reproachful look at his daughter. “You should see the trouble we have trying to get this one to tell us where her allowance goes.” Margaret blushes deeply but says nothing. He goes on, “When I was young, my idea of wealth was $1,500 a year. I thought that would be enough to support myself and my parents.” He guffaws and shakes his head. “Imagine that! $1,500 a year.”


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The mention of a precise sum makes Teacher grow tensely alert. Money does that to her. In her mind, the sum of $1,500 is instantly transformed into quantities of food stuffs, bolts of cloth, loads of coal, hours of electricity, so many railway tickets, so much shoe leather. Her imagination piles up these commodities into a wall, a barrier between her and the ever-present threat of utter destitution. That threat is real to her in a way it can never be for you, Helen, because she actually lived it for the first fourteen years of her life. For her, the threat has a name—the almshouse at Tewksbury. Those memories are more real to her than anything in the present, more real than this opulent room, for instance. Without warning, this place with its lush fabrics, rare books, and hothouse flowers dissolves before her eyes like so much smoke and is replaced by the remembered stench and clamor of that other place. Her nostrils still sting with the scent of human waste, unwashed bodies, food so mean and meager it made the gorge rise to swallow it. Her ears ring with the groans of unwed mothers in labor, the frailer wails of their undersized infants, the grating scrape of the iron cots that wheeled the bodies, young and old, off to the dead house. Do you know all this about Teacher, Helen? It’s 1913, so you don’t yet know the whole story about her early life. You know however, that money is always on her mind. You know that her mind can instantly calculate the monetary value of anything she encounters. While for you, the taste of that cake evokes pleasant memories of your mother’s baking and childhood birthday parties; for Teacher it produces a mental grocery list—so many eggs at so much a dozen, so many ounces of butter and sugar at so many pennies a pound, her calculations adjusted for inflated New York City prices and for the high overhead of such a household as this. You know too that it was the mention of the specific sum, $1,500, which made her tense up. Why $1,500? you wonder. Why not $5,000? since that is the amount of the pension Carnegie has offered you. And thinking this, you stiffen in your chair. This leads me to wonder what it is you think you are doing here today. You have already refused Carnegie’s pension several times, so why come talk to the man? It occurs to me that you may have come with an inchoate plan to ask him to bestow that money to some other individual or charity. Perhaps you discussed this with Teacher and thought she agreed with you. Now, it occurs to you that Teacher has come here with a different plan.


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So you are tense, too, alert to the words she will speak next. Slowly, your hand steals up her arm to rest on her shoulder, a sign that you are prepared to read her lips rather than her fingers. And for his part, Carnegie is aware that something is up between you two. He is not a stupid man. He did not amass such a fortune by failing to pick up on things. It makes him wonder what brings you here today. His offer of the pension still holds; what need is there to come discuss it? Perhaps he assumes you are now willing to accept the money but that pride stands in your way. For a minute, he considers making it easy for you. He could say, “So I take it you’ve decided to accept the pension,” go to his desk, and write the check. But something makes him hesitate. He barely knows you two, but he senses that the tension between you comes from some other cause. Even his daughter seems conscious of something. Both of them look from Teacher to you, then back again. Finally, he clears his throat and emits a forced laugh that makes everyone, except you, look at him. Then he says, “Happiness, indeed! Yes, a very fine topic for a lecture. None better. I always say, misery is in the air we breathe, but good cheer is worth money.” You drop your hand again so she can spell this to you. Your mouth twitches and you spell back, “Worth money? But not very much. He just told me my lecture on happiness was only worth fifty cents.” She hesitates before delivering your words, unsure how he will take them. But he slaps his knee and laughs. “That’s a good one,” he says. “She has spunk. I’ll give her that.” As if to keep things on this jovial tone, he continues, “And what is Miss Keller’s prescription for happiness?” Teacher expects that you will recite some platitude from the original “Happiness” speech. You know this is what she expects and begin that way, “What would make me happy would be the knowledge that every mill worker and miner in this great land of ours could enjoy”—you sweep your free hand out to indicate your surroundings—“some small fraction of all your advantages.” Because of the slight delay between your spelling and her speaking, she is able to stop herself at the word enjoy. She jerks her hand out of yours, scowling, annoyed with herself for letting you lead her on. Then, glancing quickly at Carnegie, she extends the abrupt gesture into a replica of yours and concludes, “could enjoy the edification that comes from great literature.” “Yes, yes, literature!” he says, relieved to echo her tone. “Literature! The greatest achievement of man. ‘. . . hath charms to soothe the savage beast.’”


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Now it is Teacher’s turn to wag a finger at him, “I think you’ve got that wrong, Mr. Carnegie. I think that’s music.” “Wrong! Am I?” He makes a commanding gesture toward his daughter. “Quick, Margaret. Where’s my Shakespeare?” In a flash, the girl scurries across the room to wrestle a huge volume off the shelf. You feel the commotion and reach for Teacher’s hand. “Get ready for a game of famous quotations,” she tells you. “What did you say to him?” you ask. She does not answer. Perhaps you don’t expect an answer, or even want one, since this is not the time or place to get into it. So you all relax and give yourself over to this odd test of your memory. Carnegie recites a phrase or two, sending Margaret scurrying around the room to haul one volume after the other off the shelves. He quotes, “The quality of mercy is not strained . . .” “He must be joking,” you say to Teacher. “Everybody knows that one. Tell him how Dr. Bell always recites that.” But recalling Carnegie’s earlier remarks about Dr. Bell, she refrains from adding this comment. He says, “A man’s reach must exceed his grasp.” “Oh, please!” you say, “Now he’s just being insulting.” He says, “Know this. The man who injured Warwick never passed uninjured yet.” “Good grief,” you say to Teacher. “I don’t have the foggiest. Warwick who?” He says, “Speaking of happiness, how about this one: ‘. . . the air had blossomed into joy.’ Good, isn’t it? Air, flowers, joy. Who said that?” “Sounds like Shelley,” you say. Teacher makes a face, but she says “Shelley” anyway, because you are better read than she is. “Wrong!” Carnegie says triumphantly, “It was Robert Ingersoll. He said that when he saw the American flag flying over foreign soil he felt the ‘air had blossomed into joy.’ A very fine sentiment, don’t you think?” “Of course the language is pure Shelley,” you say. “Ingersoll just translated it to suit his patriotic purposes.” Teacher absorbs your words but all she says is, “Indeed!” “Here’s another she should know,” Carnegie says. “She’s a Southerner. How about this one: ‘There is not enough air on the American continent to float two flags.’”


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“Ingersoll,” you say. “Correct!” He pats your hand. “She has a head on her shoulders, I can see.” “Good guess,” Teacher adds. Your hand twitches in hers, which is your way of shrugging. “It wasn’t a guess. He seems to have Ingersoll on the brain,” you say. “Tell him that some people would call Robert Ingersoll a socialist.” But you know she will not. And so it goes until Miss Carnegie has to excuse herself to go to her singing lesson. Her father takes the opportunity to consult his watch. Even you can feel he’s ready for you and Teacher to leave. “Well, I’m glad you ladies decided to drop by,” he says. “Always lovely to see you. You know Mrs. Carnegie and I always have your best interest on our minds. Let me say again that I think it’s admirable that she still wants to make a go of things on her own,” he says. “My offer still holds, of course. Nevertheless, self-reliance, initiative—these are the virtues that made America great.” He presses his palms flat on his knees preparing to stand, then notices that Teacher is not budging. She smiles apologetically. “Well, yes, Helen is very idealistic, very independent to the extent that she can be.” While she speaks these words to him, she tells you, “He says his offer still holds. He expects an answer, Helen.” You do not respond. Now she leans forward and lowers her voice, forcing him to lean forward even though there’s no one else in the room to hear. “The problem is, Helen does not always have a realistic notion of the price of things.” But to you she says, “He says to tell you that Fate has added your burden to those who are living with you. You must think of them as well as yourself, Helen.” You take this in and stop smiling. It stings you. It shoots a hot throb up your arm into your chest. You would like to respond, would like to say that no one knows better than you what a burden you are to those who live with you. At the same time, however, you know Teacher. You know how her mind works. You know it was her idea to come here. Your face grows red, then pale. Into her hand you say, “Did he really say that?” There is no response. Her hand is motionless. The flesh of her palm is inert, cool to your touch. So you say, “Tell him that those who live with me share my belief about the humiliation and hypocrisy of accepting charity.”


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Carnegie is still leaning forward, still watching Teacher’s face. He sees her jaw suddenly tighten and her eyeballs quiver. He doesn’t know why, but he is almost afraid to ask, “What did she say?” She rises abruptly, drawing you to your feet as she does. Then she turns on him a smile of such startling sweetness, he is momentarily unable to stand. “She says that she does not wish to reject your generosity out of hand.” Taking his hand, she leans toward him again, confiding, “I think it’s just a matter of time.” And of course she is right, in this as in all things. In a little over a year from now, an event will take place in a hotel room in Bath, Maine, which will change your mind. Teacher will be sick, worse than she has ever been before, so sick in fact that she will pass out. You will be unable to revive her and will rush from the room to find help. But you will become disoriented in the unfamiliar corridor, turning first one way then the other, before you locate the stairs. In the lobby, the night clerk will not know who you are, will not understand that you are blind and deaf, will become so alarmed by your frantic motions and incoherent mumbling that he will believe you are having some sort of fit. At last, you will be able to calm down enough to communicate through gesture and a few words scrawled on the blotter that it is Teacher who needs the help, and a doctor will finally be summoned. Teacher will get better of course, and the next day, you will be able to get her to the train and back home to Wrentham. But the incident will leave you rattled, uneasy, uncertain about many things. You will realize in a new way how much of a burden you are to her. You’ve always known this. What’s new will be the recognition of the lengths to which she will go to get the compensation she thinks she deserves. She needs more than you can earn with your writing and lecturing, more compensation, more help, more security, more of a buffer between her and her past. So you will write to Mr. Carnegie and humbly accept his patronage. October 26 But this is all nothing but another digression. Forgive me for that. Anyway, I raise an ugly possibility here. Yes, it is possible that Teacher deceived you, altered people’s words to you, distorted facts, left things


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out on purpose. But it was a possibility you willed yourself to ignore. You trusted Teacher. You trusted Teacher because you had always trusted Teacher. You took her word for everything, because if you started questioning her accuracy, much less her motives, there would be no end to questions. That’s why they call it blind faith, after all. And there’s something else, too. Unlike a lot of seeing-hearing people who assumed you were merely the passive receiver of her words, she knew you had access to the world beyond what she told you. She knew from her own experience that a person doesn’t have to see to be observant. And she’d known you long enough to know that you were particularly attuned to the finer nuances of human interaction. True, you could not see facial expressions or hear tones of voice but you could feel, among many other things, changes in the air currents that signaled the tension or relaxation of the people around you. She also knew how adept you were at reading her, interpreting meaning from the mobility and temperature of her hands as she spelled to you. She may have doubted whether she could deceive you even if she wanted. Another thing: I must not underestimate her adaptation to the particularities of your shared life. Just as you were accustomed to receiving information from her, she was accustomed to delivering it. She was narrating every event while it was in progress. And she’d been doing it long enough that it was second nature, no longer always in her conscious control. It would not be that easy to switch off the flow of accurate information. Besides, she knew you had many friends who felt she had too much sway over you. So if she ever deceived you and you found out, those enemies would step in and she’d be on her own. So you believed her account of everything was as accurate as anyone’s. Belief can make things true. October 28 Here’s my current favorite story about you, which vaguely relates to what we’ve been discussing. It was very early, maybe that first summer Teacher was there. So you were only seven, still in the process of acquiring language. She was naming various jobs and professions: The carpenter made the house; the baker made the bread, the cobbler made the shoes, etc. And you asked, “Who made me?”


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Teacher hesitated because she was not quite sure how she was going to tackle that question, but before she had to say anything, you answered your own question, saying, “I know. The photographer made me.” You were referring to a family trip you’d just taken, all the way to Memphis, where you’d all had your portraits made at the best photographer’s studio, using the idiom of your day when a photographer “made” portraits. But in a different way, you were right. The photographer did make you. The fact that you photographed so well made you what you were. You knew, or Teacher knew and told you, how much image matters, how much stronger your message would be with your image to accompany it. You liked to pose for cameras. All you needed was someone to tell you which way to point your head. I love all those pictures of you with celebrities where you’re touching their faces. You were either demonstrating how you could read people’s lips or else finding out what the person looked like through touch. By the way, Helen, you were the only blind person I’ve ever heard of who actually did that. Was it a gimmick because you found out, as we all do, that the Normals expect this of blind people, or did you actually get something out of it? In any case, it always looks like you’re trying to blot the other person out of the picture. Not that you needed to of course. Even in large group photos, yours is the face that draws the eyes first. Or so people tell me. The camera loved you, always, even late in life. Your final photo still had something of the quality of the first. There you are, smiling for the camera, fake hair, fake teeth, fake eyes, but gorgeous. Lights. Camera. Helen Keller. October 29 Which brings me back to the subject at hand—the Helen Keller Myth, how it got started and how it perpetuated itself. The Helen Keller Image, I guess I mean now too. Yes, you tried to write about other things, to have a career as a freelance writer and public intellectual, but questions about the authenticity of your writing and unease about your politics made it harder and harder for you to make a living this way. To your credit, you kept at it as long as possible, but by the time you were in your mid-thirties, it became apparent that the story of your early life was your one truly marketable asset. Which was what persuaded you in 1918 to take your story to Hollywood and participate in the film Deliverance.


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I like to imagine you in Hollywood, the three of you—Teacher, you, and Polly Thomson—with all your East Coast tastes and intellectual leanings. I imagine Teacher liked it there. She would have liked the climate for one thing, and after the grueling grind of the lecture circuit, Hollywood would have felt like a vacation. I imagine her sitting outside under a sort of canopy arrangement back behind the cameras. They still filmed outside for the natural light. She sits facing the set, a construction of wooden floorboards and painted backdrops of cloth and plywood. She’s stretched out on a canvas lounge chair. There’s a small table at her elbow with the script and today’s rewrites, and a tall drink. She likes Hollywood. They treat her well. They treat her well because she carries herself like a star. Though none of the underlings can really say what she’s doing here, they all instinctively respond to her star bearing. Every five or six minutes, a young person offers to fill her glass or bring her something to eat. In all honesty, she doesn’t think much of the cinema. The flickering black-and-white images make her eyes hurt, and the few films she’s watched all the way through lack artistic depth in her opinion. And your comment that when people watch silent movies it’s like being deaf and color-blind clinched it for her. And she doesn’t think much of movie people. They’re all nice enough, and generally attractive, well-dressed in a sort of flashy way. But they seem childish and shallow. They have no conversation, no substance. Except Mr. Chaplin. She liked him. He invited you all to lunch, and she and he had a nice long chat. She sensed that they came from similar backgrounds, though they didn’t talk about that specifically. Still she sensed a kinship in him. He was someone who had known true privation and suffering. They’d talked a little bit about his films. She doesn’t think much of them. She finds his comedy charming but too light, not that she said this, of course. Mr. Chaplin had explained that he hoped to reach the broadest popular audience through comedy. He said that cinema was art for the people. Teacher suggested that he should try to bring a more serious message to his films, and he seemed to agree. The problem with cinema, she is beginning to recognize, is that every decision is made by committee. It seems that every day, a crowd of people—script writers, producers, financial backers—come through to reject


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the work of the day before. She participates in all these conferences, but has to admit she has a hard time recalling what’s in the film and what’s out. So far they have completed the scenes of your early life, with a child actress playing you. There was the scene representing Teacher’s arrival at Ivy Green, some fight scenes indicating her struggles with you. The pump scene. Teacher does not care for the actress they got to play her. The young woman seems rather too prim and school marmish. As she mentioned to Mr. Chaplin, “You wouldn’t know it to look at me now, but at the time, I was considered rather pretty.” And he had smiled and said something gallant. Once the early scenes were completed, there was a good deal of debate about the middle period, meaning basically the time you were at Radcliffe. The problem seemed to be that there was no story after you learned language. “Where’s the love interest?” several script writers kept complaining. Teacher was not about to divulge anything about the unfortunate Peter Fagan incident, much less anything about John Macy. For a while, they considered inventing a suitor, but they gave up the idea. Finally someone decided to create a fantasy where you, played by another actress, would daydream yourself into the books you read. You were in love with literature. Teacher had witnessed the filming of one of these scenes, you in love with Odysseus. Still, they had convinced her that this was the sort of thing film audiences expect. The problem is, now the whole script is moving rapidly toward allegory. Yesterday they filmed a scene in which Wisdom, played by a rather frail young woman in a flowing robe, fought with Ignorance, played by a rather brawny young man, over the infant Helen, represented by a doll in a basket. Teacher admires the sentiment, and understands the necessity to translate abstract concepts into images, but she worries that the thing is getting out of hand. She turns her attention to the stage in front of her, where you and Polly are talking to the director, Mr. Platt. You have worked out a system for him to communicate while the cameras are rolling. He stands off camera and stamps his foot so you feel the vibrations through the floorboards. One stamp means “Turn to the right,” two stamps means, “walk to the window,” and so forth. Now, the three of you are walking through the sequence. Mr. Platt explains what he wants you to do, while Polly spells his words into your hand. The set, Teacher gathers, is meant to represent your house in Forest Hills. In the scene, you are supposed to enter the room at the left


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and cross to the window at the right, where you encounter a birdcage hanging on a stand. It is one of a series of scenes meant to show your daily life. Here, the main point, as Teacher understands it, is that you can cross the room without bumping into the furniture, which is quite a feat since the set is remarkably overfurnished, with a large dining table set with a complete dinner service for twelve, an armchair with a footstool, several potted ferns in plant stands, and an upright piano. When the rehearsal is over, everyone clears out of the frame. Mr. Platt yells, “Roll camera,” and after a minute stamps his foot to tell you to begin. The door opens and you enter the room. You look odd, Teacher thinks. You’re wearing that very pale makeup and a blonde wig. Apparently this is necessary to make you look natural on film. They’ve dressed you in a simple print dress, which is flattering enough, but the pastel pink color seems too young for you, she thinks. But she guesses they know what they’re doing. You look very trim at any rate. You’ve been told repeatedly that the camera makes people look heavy, so you’ve been watching your weight. After you’ve paused in the doorway for two seconds, Mr. Platt stamps the floor twice, and you begin to move. You maneuver effortlessly through the maze of furniture, and come to a halt by the window. The window is hung with what Teacher considers distressingly tawdry curtains. At another signal from Mr. Platt, you push these aside and raise the sash. As you step back from this activity, your upstage hand encounters the birdcage. Keeping your face in profile to the camera, you run both hands over the exterior of the cage, apparently trying to determine what it is or what it contains. Mr. Platt stamps some more, and you take a step back from the cage, turn to face the camera. As you do this, you press both hands against your cheeks, part your lips, and round your eyes in an expression of unutterable anguish. “Cut!” Mr. Platt yells. The cameraman stops cranking. The door opens and Polly crosses to you, still posed by the birdcage, pulls one hand off your face to tell you, “He says to stop.” “What was that?” Mr. Platt is asking. “What is it that he wants,” you respond to Polly. “I said she should look sad,” Platt complains, “not terrified. It’s nothing but a harmless little canary. She looks like she thinks there’s a man-eating tiger in there.” Polly covers her mouth with her hand as if she’s the one being reprimanded. Then she remembers her duty and spells the director’s words to


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you. Polly has been in a constant state of intimidation ever since you all arrived in Hollywood. She’s the only one of the three of you who really pays attention to the movies, and she’s rather star-struck. When she was introduced to Douglas Fairbanks, she almost swooned. You are oblivious to Polly’s timidity. You say, “I don’t understand what canary this is supposed to be. We don’t have a canary. The only canary I ever had was when I was seven years old.” “Please sir,” Polly says in a small voice, “Miss Keller would like to know . . . that is, she would like to say that she does not own a canary at present so she . . .” “It’s a symbol,” Mr. Platt interrupts. He sighs with exaggerated weariness. Then he touches the cage. “The bird is a symbol of her imprisonment.” He points to the window. “The window is a symbol of the freedom she found through her education. I thought I explained all that. Tell her we’re going to try it again. This time, she should just look sad. She should identify with the bird in the cage and its desire to be free. Tell her that. Tell her to act natural.” Again Polly hesitates. Now someone pats your face with a powder puff, and someone else straightens your collar. Polly repeats what he said as she leads you back to the door. She manages to give you the gist of Platt’s words. “What imprisonment?” you say. “When is this supposed to take place? Act natural? How am I supposed to act natural if this is supposed to be symbolic? Which does he want?” Teacher can sense your agitation even from her distance. She knows you are not happy with the way this film is going, with the whole movie scheme. For her part, she can’t quite remember how the movie plan came to be, because, for once, she was not the one who initiated it. Basically, it fell into her lap. An anonymous financier sent his agents to Forest Hills, and they laid out the plan. “The Helen Keller story on the silver screen,” they said. They already had a treatment in hand. They offered a large advance, a generous percentage of the gross proceeds. Teacher was savvy enough to hold out for gross, not just net. She has no taste for the cinema, but she’d heard of the fortunes that can be made in Hollywood. Even if this film is only moderately successful, it will bring in money that, if invested wisely, could keep the three of you for years to come. That was the plan, anyway. The only thing she had not really considered was the film itself. Since she does not pay attention to the movies, she really


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had no idea in advance what they might do to your story. She recognizes that to make this movie, certain liberties must be taken. Visual rather than verbal representation requires a certain amount of stylization. Still, she’s beginning to feel that the story is slipping from your control. She may have to say something soon. But now they start the filming again. Again, you cross the room without effort. But this time when you touch the birdcage, you lift your face skyward, then raise your free arm and draw the back of your hand slowly across your eyes, as if wiping away a congealing tear. “Cut!” Platt shouts. “What was that?” He flings his script to the ground and turns around in exasperation. He sees Teacher and asks again, “What was that?” She sighs, then laboriously lifts herself from the lounge chair. Where do you come up with these gestures, she wonders as she plods heavily across the ground to join you on the stage. She remembers the first day she saw you all those years ago, how you grabbed her hat, plunked it onto your little head, then stood before the looking glass in the corner, tilting your head from side to side, primping and preening. How did you know to do this? What meaning could a mirror have for you? Teacher knew that like most blind children, you liked always to be in close contact with someone, usually your mother, and that you could follow and reproduce the movements of others’ bodies. What surprised her, then as now, was the way you exaggerated those movements, magnified them into melodramatic pantomimes. She joins you on the stage, elbowing Polly out of the way. “I’ll just be a minute,” she says to Platt, giving him her best smile. She takes your hand. Even before your fingers form a single letter, she feels the nervous agitation there. Then you are spelling 200 words a minute: “We don’t have a canary. I don’t know why he thinks we have a canary. I haven’t had a canary since the one you gave me that first Christmas. Tim, remember? Then I let him out of the cage and the cat ate him. Is that what he’s thinking . . .?” She stills your hand without answering. She wads your quivering fingers into a fist and presses your hand to your side. At her touch, you relax. You are reassured, soothed. Then she takes your face in her hands. With careful fingers, she molds your expression. She makes the corners of your mouth droop. Then she presses your eyebrows upward so creases appear on your forehead. She tilts your head one way then the other to find the best angle.


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She examines her handiwork carefully, the sculptress appraising clay. Then turns to Platt, “How’s that?” she asks. He raises his arms and lets them flop to his sides. “Yes!” he says. “It’s what I’ve been saying all along.” She pats your arm and tells you, “That’s all he wants, Helen. Just the face. You touch the cage. You make the face. It’ll be fine.” And it is. It takes a couple more takes, but finally you get it right. Then they strike the set and start preparing for another scene. You are led away for a new costume, and Polly goes along with you. Teacher returns to her shady refuge and asks for another drink. There is another script conference. A couple of script writers, a production assistant, and a representative of the financial backer assemble to discuss the “bedroom scene” with Platt. The scene was originally conceived to satisfy the documentary content of the film. Viewers, it was decided, would want to see you get ready for bed. They would want to see for themselves that a blind person sleeps with her eyes closed. Teacher smiles, recalling this discussion. A costume assistant arrives to display the nightgown and robe you are to wear. Teacher examines them carefully. The gown is highnecked, long-sleeved. The robe is a simple satin wrap. It’s all very modest and correct. She smiles again, remembering how funny Mr. Chaplin had been when she discussed the scene with him. He offered to show up and climb through the bedroom window, playing your secret suitor. “They said they wanted a love interest,” he’d said, wagging his eyebrows in mock lasciviousness. Then he plucked a flower from the vase on the table and bounded around his dining room in comic balletic style. Now Teacher is distracted by the arrival of a crowd of extras, dozens of them. She squints through the bright sunlight. This must be a different scene, she thinks. She reaches for her script, but someone has walked away with it. So she squints at the extras, trying to recall the scene where they might belong. But it’s hard for her to determine who they’re supposed to be. Some are dressed, as she understands it, to represent working people. There’s a man in coveralls carrying a pick axe and wearing a helmet with a light on the front. Then there’s another carrying a hoe and wearing overalls, a gingham shirt, and a straw hat. In addition to these, there are many others dressed in ragged, nondescript clothing. A man with white hair adjusts a false beard, then leans on a long staff, holding a trumpet to his ear. A tall, gaunt young man in a shapeless hat wears dark glasses and


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takes a few practice shuffles back and forth, brandishing a tin cup and a white cane. Some stage hands are assisting a boy to strap up one of his legs so it is concealed under his tattered garment. They give him a crutch and he hobbles about. Makeup girls move among the crowd, applying a gray powder over the chalky makeup on their faces and hands. This is meant, Teacher gathers, to represent the grime of toil and the soot of destitution. Then you appear. You are dressed in white, a long flowing robe, similar to the one Wisdom wore the day before. Polly is with you, and a hairdresser is pinning a sort of veil over your hair. You look very attractive, Teacher muses. She likes the way the white robe makes you stand out in high contrast to all the grimy extras. But the veil makes you look a bit like a nun or a nurse. Then she snaps out of it and is confused. “Mr. Platt,” she says in her polite but peremptory tone. “Mr. Platt, if you don’t mind. I thought we were going to shoot the . . .” As the hairdresser finishes, you finger your costume and ask Polly, “What am I wearing? Is this supposed to be my nightgown?” Polly sucks on her knuckles and scrutinizes you carefully. “I don’t think so,” she says uncertainly. “I think it’s . . . it’s something like . . . it’s medieval rather. . .” “Medieval?” you say. “I thought I was supposed to . . .” You are so aggravated, you can barely move your fingers. You could almost cry except that they’ve made you so nervous about spoiling your makeup. You don’t like the makeup. It’s making you sweat. Why do you have to wear it? And why do you have to cover your hair? You have beautiful hair; everyone’s always said so. You’re trying with all your might to be patient, to be a good sport, but you are taxed to your limit. And now they want you to wear this ridiculous costume, whatever it is. “Medieval!” you say again and stamp your foot. “Tell them I won’t wear it. Tell them I won’t . . .” Then suddenly you stand stockstill. Your attention drops to your feet where you feel an unexpected vibration. Your nostrils dilate. Your face is blank, intent. You say, “A horse?” “No one said anything about a horse,” Teacher says in the same instant. But there it is, a large white creature, being led by the bridle through the throng of extras. “Nothing to worry about,” Platt says. “Perfectly safe. Gentle as a lamb.” “It’s not that.” Teacher squints through the sunlight at the animal. From her Irish heritage, she prides herself on her ability to judge horse flesh. And even with her poor eyes, she can tell this is a rather sorry specimen. It looks


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overfed and sluggish. A group of makeup girls is working on it now, applying the same sooty powder they’d put on the actors, though now this is supposed to suggest the shadowy definition of muscular flanks and shoulders. Teacher purses her lips at this. She supposes that on film this artifice may work. But to her, the animal only looks like an oversized pony that has gotten itself a little dusty. “Safety is not my concern,” she says. “Miss Keller is quite an accomplished horsewoman. I’m only saying, I thought we were going to shoot . . .” “The mother of all sorrows,” Platt says. “You know, the finale, the big finish.” He squares off a frame with his hands in the way everyone seems to do here in Hollywood and says, “Helen Keller, the mother of all sorrows, leading the blind, the deaf, the lame, the oppressed masses into the glorious future.” He makes a large flourish in an easterly direction to indicate the glorious future, she supposes. But before Teacher can protest, Platt is striding away from her, shouting directions as he goes. Meanwhile, they’ve gotten you on the horse. A cloak has been added to your costume, and this is being draped around you and the horse. Polly is trying to repeat Platt’s words to you as he explains about the mother of all sorrows and the glorious future. You are not happy. “What?” you keep saying. You even say it out loud, “Whadt?” because Polly’s hand keeps slipping out of reach. When you have hold of it, you say, “When is this supposed to take place? Is this another dream sequence? Is this . . . ?” But now Polly is being led away so they can rehearse the shot. One of the extras, wearing an oversized weighted shoe to make him limp, leads the horse forward. The horse lumbers forward and the oppressed multitudes limp and grope after you. The horse’s girth is so large, you find it difficult to keep your balance. You grip with your knees as hard as you can and manage to stay in the saddle. Now the horse is being led back to the starting point. More adjustments are made to your costume. They seem not to want your feet to show. Instructions are shouted at the extras. Two young men, assistants to somebody, stand near Teacher’s chair to watch this critically. One holds up his hands and frames you and the horse between them. “There should be more horses,” he says, “at least three.” “And they should be galloping,” the other one says. “Galloping?” Teacher thinks with alarm. “Galloping!”


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Now there is a lull while Platt rearranges the oppressed and afflicted around you. Because you have no choice, you calm yourself; but at your core you are still uneasy and deeply indignant. You feel they are asking too much of you. Yes, you relish a challenge. That’s the whole story of your life. If any of these people had bothered to read even one of your books, they’d know this. Triumph over adversity—it’s what you do. But this is too much. They are not giving you enough information, enough to go on. You’ve been to the movies with Polly and simply do not get it. She reads you the titles, then forgets to describe what’s going on in between, so you get a rather truncated impression. Teacher says that the flickering light on the screen has a hypnotic effect, and you think she must be right. You know infants will stare at a flickering candle for hours on end, and assume sighted people never lose that inclination. To be sociable, you tag along with Polly. Sometimes you bring a book and sit and read in the dark. You understand stage plays. When you go to the theater, it feels completely different. There’s a sort of energy that comes from the interaction between the actors on the stage and the audience. You understand playacting. You and Teacher used to act out scenes from books you read in school. But this? One minute you’re identifying with a canary, and the next you’re sitting on a horse in a medieval costume. Does this make sense? It’s no way to tell a story, you think. You need more than this—a context, a plot, something. The horse has one of those all-over body twitches. Instinctively, you pat its neck and say aloud, “Whoa, boy.” You feel a ripple in the air, the presence of people on the ground around you. Perhaps it is a ripple of laughter, a murmur of surprise at your speech. You lean forward over the horse’s neck and say, “Act natchoowel.” Now you feel an abrupt warm wave of laughter rising around you. It pleases you. You like to make people laugh, and you seldom get the opportunity. Your lectures are so earnest and serious, and at parties and receptions, people expect you to be charismatic and inspirational, not a comedian. The horse is less pleased by the laughter. It shakes its head suddenly, causing you to drop the reins. Then it stamps the ground three times. “Three stamps means open the window,” your brain tells you, and the thought makes you smile. You think of speaking it out loud to your audience, but you are not sure they were around during the earlier scene. You remember someone describing a circus act to you where a horse stamped its hoofs and shook its head in response to its trainer’s questions. You want


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to say something about this, to make a joke to this effect, but cannot think how to focus your idea into a succinct statement. And now someone is pressing an object into your hand. It is a long, cool metal tube that widens at one end into a cone shape. As you explore it with your fingers you feel your brow crease with the effort. On an impulse, you exaggerate this expression, cocking your head to one side and scratching behind your ear with your free hand. “Whadz dis?” you say aloud. Again you are rewarded by laughter. From under her canopy, Teacher hears all this and doesn’t like the raucous note in that laughter. Though she knows that the disreputable appearance of all these people comes from their costumes and makeup, she still feels uneasy. Rising, she spots Polly standing off to one side and motions her back to you. Then she trudges out to join Platt. He is supervising the final touches on some costumes, grouping his cast in different patterns and appraising the effect through his viewfinder. Now he is calling for silence so he can give his final instructions. “When the cameras roll,” he says, “Miss Keller will sound the clarion call that will summon the world’s afflicted to follow.” You take these words in as Polly spells them to you. You feel the eyes of your audience on you. You expand your face into a broad grin, then articulate carefully, “Yeth, fa-woe. If yoo can heya!” There is a pause as they labor to understand your words. Then a broad general whoop of laughter sweeps up around you, buoyed on an undercurrent of murmuring, “She said, ‘if you can hear.’” Teacher is beside Platt now. He is glaring at you for spoiling the somber mood he wants. “Silence!” he’s shouting, “Places for take one. Places!” Teacher touches his sleeve. “Mr. Platt, I really have to object. I don’t think this scene has the dignity that we . . .” He waves her away, “It’s perfect,” he says. “The perfect finish. You’ll see.” Then he turns, shouting instructions to the straggling extras. Still warmed by the response you’re getting, you raise the prop trumpet to your lips, fill your cheeks with air, and blow as hard as you can. To everyone’s surprise, the thing emits a sound, a prolonged moaning tone a bit like a foghorn. You feel it as a tingling sensation in your skull and a vibration in your lower ribs. You take another breath and blow again, this time even harder. Now you feel the horse move beneath you. This time, it is not the ungainly wobble forward, or even the involuntary twitch. It lowers its head


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and arches its spine, then flings its head back and rears up on its hind legs, pawing the air with its front. You are thrown forward and feel yourself sliding down the animal’s body, so you cling with your legs and grab at its neck. The weight of your movement brings it down again. It bucks out backward as its front feet hit, then takes off at a gallop. There is a second’s pause, a heartbeat of general astonishment. Then the crowd of stunned extras takes off in hot pursuit. When the dust clears, Teacher still has hold of the director’s sleeve. She hears voices and another round of laughter a little ways off, so she assumes you’ve all come to a halt at the low fence that separates this filming area from the next. She knows enough about horses to feel assured that there’s no way that bloated pony could clear even a low fence with you on its back. Relieved, she composes her face in an apologetic smile and turns to Platt. He turns his flabbergasted face back in her direction. But his eyes have misted over, so he doesn’t seem to see her. “Unbelievable!” he gasps. A tear forms at the corner of his eye, drips down his cheek, and falls to the ground. “If only we could get it on film.” November 2 Helen, You’ll love this. I was at a meeting today. We were compiling a bibliography of texts by and about people with disabilities. Have you heard? There’s something called Disability Studies now. Originally, the term was used to refer to scholarship in law, medicine, social work, education, and related fields associated with people with disabilities. Now it has come to include work in history and literature as well. Anyway, the task of this committee was to compile a bibliography for a new course we’re proposing, and for a while, everything was going along smoothly, until all of a sudden, I heard myself say, “Where’s Helen Keller?” I say that I heard myself say this because it was not something I had planned to say. I didn’t go into the meeting with you on my mind. So when I said your name out loud, I was as surprised as everyone else. Then I said it again, “Where’s Helen Keller? There’s not a single text by or about Helen Keller. Nothing.” And it was the way I said it. As I’ve told you before, sometimes there’s a certain ring that charges a person’s voice,


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which prompts anyone hearing it to think, “This is a crank, a crazy person.” I knew it was happening on this occasion because of the silence. It was one of those vibrating silences. It was as if the intensity of my tone sucked all the sound out of the air and left behind nothing but a resonating absence. After a while, I broke in saying that there wasn’t even a reference to The Miracle Worker, much less Deliverance. True, that film was a flop, and very few people have even heard of it, but it seemed to me, given the other films listed, that one or the other should be included. Then I said, “The point is, I don’t know how anyone can talk about disability in America and not mention Helen Keller.” Another silence. This time I paid attention to it and realized it was not merely the absence of sound; the stridency of my words was causing something to harden into a wall of resistance. I should mention that everyone there was disabled. I realized that each of them, in his or her own way, was closing off from what I was saying, throwing up a barrier against you, Helen. I realized that they all felt about you as I do. Or did, I should say, since I guess the reason I’m telling you this is to indicate how things have changed for me. This silence acted on me as a goad, a challenge, and I rose to it. I went on and on, I rattled off your titles, talked about the movies, about vaudeville, about your work as a fund-raiser. To clinch it, I said, “I mean, where would any of us be without Helen Keller? At home, the lucky ones. In institutions, the rest of us, maybe put out of our misery at some early age.” Yes, I was preaching, browbeating, carrying on. I concluded, “I mean, we don’t have to agree with her. We don’t have to like her. But she needs to be part of this conversation.” I prevailed. We added two titles: The World I Live In and Midstream. I guess I could have pushed for others, but sometimes you’ve got to quit while you’re ahead. Just thought you should know how things stand with me. Evening What happened, you want to know. What changed? I’ve been asking myself this very question all day, and I’m not sure I know. I suppose some of the people at that meeting may have heard my words as nothing but the old “Why can’t you be more like Helen Keller?” message


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all over again, the same message that made us all resent you when we were children. I guess what’s changed is that I’ve started to question where that message comes from. I mean, I still believe it came from you in part. I’m not letting you off the hook entirely. But you had other messages, and a lot of them got lost. To be honest, I guess I was arguing as one writer for another. If people today want to criticize, debate, or dismiss you, they should do it over your texts, not over some idealized image of you that was only partly your creation. Also, it bothers me that your writing career was impeded because the general public who loved to put you on a pedestal was not always happy to hear what you had to say. Worse than that, they didn’t always believe that you were the one saying it. It’s not that I want to make large literary claims about your work. It just seems to me that if people are interested in disability issues, they should at least read your books. That’s where I am today. Tomorrow—we’ll see. November 4 But back to your working life. Let’s talk about the vaudeville years. I have to say, I admire you for going into vaudeville, mainly because so many of your friends were so scandalized by it. And I admire the answer you always threw back at them: “How else would you have me make a living?” As you know, I’m a sucker for any remark of yours that had an edge to it. Who were they to criticize? You were doing what you had to do. After Deliverance bombed at the box office, you were hard up for options. Not that you were broke. There were still some royalties, the Carnegie pension, a stock portfolio. But you were supporting a household: you, Teacher, and now Polly, too. So when the vaudeville gig came along, you jumped at it. An unconventional career move, yes, but you were never one to conform to convention. I admire you for that, and for putting your populism into practice by taking your story to the people. Of course, it meant you had to abridge your story somewhat. Your lectures were usually an hour to an hour-and-ahalf long. In vaudeville, you only had twenty minutes. You had to sacrifice a lot of the more political content. It was a compromise you were willing to make because you liked the audiences, their warmth and enthusiasm. This was not the pious approbation of the highbrow lecture crowd. This was the


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hearty appreciation of ordinary people who like a little edification with their entertainment. So I like to think about you in vaudeville. I’d like to know more, naturally. I’d like to leaf through your scrapbook with you, skim the reviews, the programs, and have you comment, “Yes, that’s Detroit, or is it Indianapolis? And this one must be Denver. We always brought down the house out West.” So here are a few snapshots, a few postcards from the road.

The Palace Theater, New York Herman Weber, your manager, took a risk and booked your first appearance in New York because he’s been around vaudeville long enough to know that no one ever gets rich being timid. He’s worked with you and Teacher and feels he’s got a good act now. It strikes the right balance, he thinks, educational without being too preachy. And he’s got it timed to twenty minutes, which is the limit of the vaudeville audience’s attention span. As the curtain rises, Weber positions himself in the wings, stage left, so he can watch the house. Teacher enters from the right and crosses to downstage center. She is wearing a sober black gown trimmed with jet beads. She moves slowly, but her spine is straight. She pauses for two beats, for the audience to take her in and silence themselves completely. She begins to speak, in her rather deep, sonorous voice. “My name,” she says, “is Annie Sullivan.” Weber advised dropping the Macy. Not that John Macy’s name means anything anymore, if it ever did. Weber only objected to using his name because it might confuse people. “I am here tonight,” she continues, “to introduce you to a very special person.” Teacher’s voice, Weber feels, is a real asset. She knows how to enunciate without sounding snooty, and she knows how to roll her R’s and clip her vowels to give a suggestion of her Irish background. Irish still plays well in New York. In other venues, he’ll get her to tone that down. “When I first met her, she was a very little girl. And she was very unhappy. Her parents too were unhappy, because they were unable to reach her in her dark and silent world, unable to show her the light and music we all take for granted.” Weber scans the faces in the first six rows. They’re all primed for the story. He’d had two boys distributing handbills to the ticket-buyers line: “Hear the amazing story!” The text went on to give the highlights of your biography in simplified language.


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In the orchestra pit, a single violin takes up a melancholy air as Teacher continues. Weber is not sure about this. Will it be distracting? Teacher lifts her voice and lets it swell above the music. “Then, one day, at the water pump . . .” she continues. Weber checks the house again. They are content, attentive. Even if the story is not familiar to them, it’s easy to follow and engrossing enough. It has some of the appeal of a rags-to-riches story with a touch of magic to it. Now the whole string section joins the solo violin, and the music swells as Teacher brings the story to its triumphant close, “. . . has made her the cultivated, educated woman you see before you.” She raises her left hand and sweeps it out to her side. The orchestra takes up your theme song, “The Star of Happiness,” and you make your entrance from the wings. You are over forty now but look a lot younger. Your figure is still reasonably trim, aided by some skillful corseting, and you have nice legs. If you didn’t, Weber would have had you wear a long dress like Teacher’s. Your hair, which still has no gray in it, is short, a bob almost, except that it curls in a way that looks old-fashioned and cherubic. The last thing Weber wanted was for you to look like a flapper. You have your habitual smile on your face. Weber noticed this smile from the first time he met you. It’s not unlike the smile certain comics wear, though less broad and more feminine. Also, your eyes have a quizzical look, as if you’re in a perpetual state of wonder at the sheer zaniness of things. You cross the stage effortlessly and join Teacher. Then you turn to face the audience. You lift your chin. Your smile expands to reveal your fine teeth. In a clear, loud soprano you say, “Hello. My name is Helen Keller.” Weber hears a collective exhalation of wonder from the audience, like the sound of the sea in a seashell. Then there is a spontaneous outburst of applause. Weber has been in this business long enough to know how to read applause, and this is the real thing. This is not mere perfunctory clapping, but a genuine and general outpouring of feeling. He discovers he’s been holding his breath all this time. Now he relaxes. This can work, he thinks. This will be OK. And you, Helen? You feel the applause through the floorboards of the stage as a tingly vibration that skitters up your leg bones into your spine. You feel it also as a rush of warm, fragrant air flowing up and around you, in contrast to the colder air of backstage. You are glad. You are glad to be done with your name—the hardest words you ever need to pronounce.


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You’ve often joked with your various voice teachers that you wished you could change it. The L’s give you a lot of trouble, and the final R is no picnic either. But you’ve been practicing it for more than thirty years. Now you and Teacher perform the routine you’ve been doing for at least as long. Teacher demonstrates the finger alphabet. Weber observes that a few women and even some men in the first five rows are mimicking her gestures. When she’s gone through the alphabet, you cup your hand loosely around hers, loose enough so the audience can still see her gestures. Then she slowly spells a few letters. Weber notices some people leaning forward, forming the letters silently with their lips as she makes them. You say, “Apple.” You say, “Baby.” You say, “Candy.” Each word you speak is greeted by another gasp of surprise and a new round of applause. Weber sees heads shaking in wonder. He hears ripples of astonished speech. Is this demeaning to you Helen? I can’t tell. In a way, these demonstrations are so automatic, you don’t even have to think about what you’re doing. You are excited, thrilled really, by the electric tingle you feel in the air. You inhale the rich scents that rise with each new outburst of applause. You smell wool, tobacco, men’s hair oil, women’s cosmetics, the paper of the programs, the burnt dust smell of the lights, and here and there the savory sting of whisky. As you wait for the applause to subside, you say quickly to Teacher, “This is good. They like this.” But she says, “These lights are killing my eyes.” Now she says aloud, “We will now demonstrate how Miss Keller reads lips.” She places your hand on her face, and you position your fingers around her mouth with your thumb stretched down to feel her throat. She says, “In this manner, Miss Keller can understand normal conversation.” You drop your hand from her face, and turn to address the audience. “In did mannuh,” you repeat, “Mith Kelluh.” You pause to grin sheepishly and point at yourself with your thumb, which sparks a short burst of laughter. “Can unduhstandt nawmul convahsation.” The applause that follows this is even more thunderous than before. Weber notes this and wonders if it would work to invite people up from the audience to have their lips read. Would it take too much time? Waiting for the applause to subside, Teacher says quickly in your hand, “Watch your sibilants and dentals.” You press your lips together briefly then resume your smile. “It’s OK, Teacher,” you tell her.


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She puts your hand back on her face and says, “Four score and seven years ago . . .” She says, “The quality of mercy is not strained . . .” She says, “A man’s reach must exceed his grasp . . .” You find yourself wondering if John is here. You know he lives in New York now. You even know about the deaf sculptress he’s living with, though not about the baby, if she’s even been born yet. It’s possible he could have showed up for this. You know better than to ask Teacher, not that she would be able to see him anyway. What would John make of this, you wonder. Would he disapprove, call it a sideshow act? But you make yourself block these thoughts, feeling how they are deflating your smile. You feel the tide of vibrations begin to recede underfoot. Then you raise your face and announce, “Idz time for questions.” This is a risk, Weber knows. There’s the time factor again. If it takes too long for someone to volunteer, the act will die. He wonders if he should plant someone out there to get things started. The Q & A was your idea. You and Teacher promised that you could handle it because you knew all the questions people ask from the lecture days. But before he can think this far ahead, a man in the fifth row, raises his hand and stands to ask, “What is Miss Keller’s age?” Teacher transcribes this, adding, “He’s straight ahead. Drop your eyes a little.” You do this, then arch your brows and purse your lips, and wag a warning finger at the audience, saying, “The gentleman must know dere is no age on the vaudeville stage.” There’s a bubble of silence which explodes into applause and laughter. As if propelled by the momentum, another man pops out of his seat and yells, “Does Miss Keller think of marriage?” “Yeth,” you say, clasping your hands to your breast and lifting your eyes to the ceiling. Then, as if the thought is suddenly occurring to you, you drop the longing look, aim it a little to your right, two o’clock as Teacher told you, extend your hand toward the speaker as if to accept an offered gift, and you say, “Iz duh gendleman proposing to me?” More laughter and applause. Someone slaps the questioner on the back as he sits down. A lady way over on the left raises a finger and says, “Do you have any sense of color, Miss Keller?” “Well,” you say slowly, “sometimes I feel blue.” You elongate your face in a mournful expression and make your body droop. “And otha times I see


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red.” You compress your face into a scowl and plant your fists on your hip, leaning forward in mock menace. The explosion of laughter that greets this almost knocks you over. Backstage, Weber is beside himself. He mops his eyes with his damp handkerchief. In his mind, he’s already dialing the phone, booking the northeast circuit, ordering posters, responding to the press. When he looks up, he discovers he is no longer alone in the wings. Other performers have gathered to watch. Near him a magician says to the dog trainer, “They’re eating it up. That girl’s a natural.” On stage, Teacher’s eyes study you, moving from your face to your posed limbs and back again. She retains her tight smile, nodding her head in acknowledgment to the uproarious audience, but her fingers twitch swiftly inside your palm, “Where are you getting this, Helen?” But you feel no need to answer her. You wave your eyebrows up and down and stretch your lips into a broader grin. As you do this, you feel a fresh rush of warm, savory air gust toward you by all their clapping hands. You spell eagerly back to her, “Aren’t there more questions?”

The Lyric, Chicago “My darlings! I have never been so moved in my life!” These words come from the doorway of your dressing room. The door has just been flung open and the space is filled by the woman’s voice and the woman herself. She is a rather stout middle-aged woman wearing a dark afternoon suit and a gauzy blouse with ruffles at the collar and cuffs. Several yards of pearls are wound around her neck and festoon off her bosom to her waist. She clings to the door frame with one bejeweled hand as if expecting rough seas. Her head is thrown back, her eyes shut in an expression of sublime rapture. Fixed atop a mass of dark curly hair there is a hat composed mostly of a pillar of white feathers, so it looks as if two or three doves are competing for the privilege of landing on her head. The woman is Sophie Tucker. You do not know this. You are standing on a low footstool while Polly pins up the hem of your dress, which got torn while you were making your exit after the matinee. To you, the woman in the doorway is a thunderous vibration in your chest and an intense floral scent in the air—gardenia, your practiced nose tells you. Teacher is lying on the couch with a damp cloth over her eyes. She has now raised the cloth’s edge and propped herself on her elbows to glare at the intruder. She


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doesn’t know who it is, either. This woman could be anyone. This is exactly what you love about vaudeville—you never know who might show up at your dressing room. Of course, this is exactly what Teacher hates about vaudeville. Though she is not near enough for you to touch her, you can still feel her start to bristle. To conceal this from your visitor, you put on your most gracious smile, step off your footstool, and extend your hand in welcome. “Hel-wo,” you say out loud. With your free hand, you reach for Polly. But Polly, who is the only one of the three of you who knows who this is, has risen from her knees, gasping, “Miss Tucker!” She advances two steps, then hesitates, looks back at Teacher who is sitting up and scowling, and then turns back to drop a schoolgirl curtsey. Miss Tucker now starts toward you. As she advances, she flings off the floor-length mink coat draped around her ample shoulders. Polly dives and manages to catch it before it hits the floor. She stands cradling the coat like an infant in an antique christening gown. Miss Tucker now has your hand clasped in both of hers. Her firm grip, accentuated by her numerous rings, makes you emit a high squeak like a dog’s squeeze toy. But you cover this saying, “Pweezed to meet-yoo.” She lets out a quick gust of laughter that hits you hard enough in the breastbone to catch your breath. Then she exclaims, “Pweezed to meetyoo too, darling!” Then she throws her arms wide and clasps you in a fullcontact bear hug. You find yourself enfolded in the rich fabric of her suit, her copious flesh and her heady scent. Since she is shorter than you, the dove feathers on her hat tickle your nose and make you want to sneeze. Teacher is on her feet now, scowling and blinking. Her eyes are blurring from the latest patent medicine she uses to doctor them. She has no idea who this intruder is. It could be anyone, from the wife of some politician to a gangster’s moll. “Madam?” she says peremptorily. Miss Tucker releases you, leaving you a bit unsteady on your feet though still smiling, and turns to clasp Teacher’s hand and pump it up and down. “Call me Sophie,” she booms. “Don’t stand on ceremony, doll. In fact, don’t stand at all. Take a load off. You look done in.” And with a firm hand on each shoulder, she thrusts Teacher back onto the sofa. Normally, no one lays a hand on Teacher. She sits, staring up at the blurry stranger with her mouth open. Miss Tucker leaves a weighted hand on Teacher’s shoulder and wraps the other around your elbow. She turns


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her broad, intelligent face from you to Teacher and back again, saying, “I simply had to tell you, it’s the finest act I’ve seen in years, and believe me, I’ve seen them all. And the bit with the questions at the end!” She lets out another hoot of laughter. “I thought I’d bust a vessel. Who do you have writing for you?” Teacher jerks free of her hand and says, “Those answers are spontaneous and unrehearsed.” “Of course, darling!” she says. “Spontaneous and unrehearsed. And I’m the queen of Sheba,” she adds, jabbing a round elbow into your rib. You still have no idea who this woman is, but she is a welcome intrusion. The atmosphere had been peevish and tense before she arrived. Teacher’s eyes are giving her so much trouble that she was threatening not to go on for the next show. Polly, who has substituted for her before, was complaining that she didn’t have a thing to wear. And you, Helen, as usual, found yourself in the middle, trying to jolly everyone along. I figure it must bother you, Helen, the way Teacher complains about her diminishing sight all the time. After all, she’s not the first person in the world ever to go blind. In fact, she used to be blind, so what’s the big deal? Not that you think like this, of course. What bothers you is the subtext of her complaints, the implication that she’s losing her sight because of everything she does for you, first all the reading she did to get you educated, and now being subjected to those awful stage lights twelve shows a week. There are times you want to tell her that she should just stay in New York and let you and Polly tour on your own. This woman’s arrival has kept you from saying this. You smile in her direction and say, “Nize ov you to come,” with your best staccato enunciation. “Oh, I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, darling. Are you kidding? You gals are the buzz of the whole circuit.” “You are aware,” Teacher says, “that she cannot hear what you’re saying.” Miss Tucker throws up her hands. “Of course. I know, deaf, blind. What a tragedy!” Then she jabs you in the rib again, and winks broadly. Teacher does not see this. She is squinting through the milky haze before her eyes, trying to glare at Polly. But Polly is still embracing the fur coat in a kind of trance. Miss Tucker takes hold of you by your shoulders and beams at you possessively. “But if you wouldn’t mind the tiniest little suggestion, here’s a tip from an old-timer. You’ve got to try to project more. All that breathy, squeaky stuff is very sweet and girlish, but you still want


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the folks in the third balcony to hear you. Here, I’ll show you.” She takes your hand and presses it to her chest. “See, you fill up your lungs and project from here. Project! PRO-JECT!” Her astonishing voice booms out of her body and rings around the room. Polly’s feet leave the floor briefly. Teacher’s hands cover her ears. And even you react. You feel the thrilling vibration against your palm. It makes the bones in your face vibrate. It makes your teeth hum. You emit an involuntary sound something like “Whoa!” You smile. “Now you try,” she says to you, and lays your hand against your own chest. “Pwo-ject!” you shout as loud as you can. “There, that’s it,” she says, squeezing your hand. “But try to speak from your diaphragm. Here.” She pokes a fist into your middle, and you double over in surprise. As you do so, her eyes widen at this new close view of your lovely thick hair. “My God!” she exclaims, “Is all that for real? I was sure it had to be a wig.” And she sinks her fingers deep into your hair. Teacher starts to rise again, and snaps, “Polly!” Polly comes out of her trance again and advances uncertainly. “Can I bring you a cup of tea, Miss Tucker?” “Call me Sophie, doll,” she says. “Tea? Never touch the stuff.” To you she says, “What you should do is pin it back a little. Here I’ll show you.” She spins you around and pushes you into the chair before the dressing table. With one expert hand, she scoops handfuls of hair back off your temples, inserting pins with the other. Then she fluffs out the curls on top with delicate jabs of her fingers. “There,” she says, addressing your reflection in the mirror. “See? Isn’t that better?” Teacher hauls herself to her feet again. “Madam,” she says, “I really don’t think we need you . . .” Miss Tucker flutters dismissive fingers at her. “Not at all, duckie. No trouble. Glad to help.” To your reflection she says, “You know you have lovely brows, but they bleach right out under those lights. Here, try this.” And before anyone can stop her, she grabs up tools from the meager array before you and pencils lines over your brows with quick, practiced strokes. “There. That’s better,” she says. “You need to extend the line a little on either side like this. You want to accentuate what’s already there. Same thing with your complexion. Those lights turn you into a ghost.” Suddenly she is sponging rouge along your cheekbones, then painting color around your lips. You are startled by all this. Your first impulse is to reach for


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Teacher’s hand, but then you don’t bother. The woman’s hands on your face are so expert, so confident, you feel at ease under them. You know hands, after all. These are broad, blunt-fingered hands. Under the fancy manicure and all the rings, you know them to be smart, hardworking hands. You inhale the quick puffs of her breath as she speaks to you, and feel the stunning vibrations of her voice. Her fingers gloss her spoken instructions with small pokes and pinches, leaving a tactile map on your face, so you know exactly what she’s saying. “You just follow the cheek bone this way, brushing upward like this. . . . Pucker up, doll, that’s right. . . . And then a little powder here . . .” It takes less than five minutes for her to do all this. She stands back, wiping her hands on a towel and grinning first at Teacher, then at Polly. “Watcha think? Makes all the difference. Don’t thank me. Glad to help, girls,” she concludes. “But now I gotta run. Grass won’t grow under these feet, that’s for sure.” She laughs uproariously, which makes you bounce in your chair. Then she clasps your shoulders again and shakes you twice. “Knock ‘em dead, doll!” She backs toward Polly, who automatically folds the coat around her shoulders again. Then, blowing kisses, Sophie Tucker is gone. “Well, I never,” Teacher says once the echo of her voice and the slamming door has receded. “The nerve, the vulgarity . . .” She is actually at a loss for words. She shakes herself in a shudder of revulsion and aggravation. Then she hands you a face cloth and spells to you, “Wash your face, Helen. We don’t want anyone to see you like this.” But you drop the cloth and run your fingers carefully over your face. Every place the woman touched shivers with newness. It feels like a new face—yours, only more so. The woman’s outrageous scent is still in your nostrils, the tickle of her outlandish hat still grazes your cheek. “No, Teacher,” you tell her patiently. “I think she may be right. I think this might be better for the stage.” Then you rise and run your fingers over her face. “Here, sit down, Teacher. I could do your face, too.”

The Orpheum, Los Angeles Grim-faced, Teacher plods down the broad central aisle of the auditorium. The house lights are lit, and the cleaning staff are busy with brooms and carpet-sweepers. There is the noise of hammering and men shouting to each other as stagehands transport flats and props. Teacher labors up


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the steps to the stage, then crosses it with her heavy but relentless pace. A brawny man carrying a huge roll of canvas on his shoulder nearly collides with her. He halts, an expletive on his lips, but the look on her face silences him. He even fumbles the cap off his head as she passes. Backstage, two jugglers are practicing their act there in the wings. One does an alarmed double take as he sees her coming, and the dozen colored balls they’ve been keeping aloft abruptly rain down and bounce away in every direction. Teacher neither pauses to help them retrieve these nor seems to register any responsibility in the mishap. As she passes on, she mutters under her breath, “Riffraff.” Several young women in garish kimonos scatter as she approaches your dressing room door. Only now does she pause to touch gently the star hanging there. Then she turns the knob and enters. You are sitting in profile at the dressing table, doing your vocal exercises. Teacher pulls the door shut and looks at you sitting there shoulderto-shoulder with your reflection. You say, “Three thousand thrilling thoughts,” enunciating carefully. Then you add, “Three trees threw true.” You pause for a minute as if giving yourself mental instructions, then continue. “Love’s labors lost,” you say several times. Then you conclude, “My name is Helwin Kelwah.” Now you make a face and try again, beginning with a repetition of the consonants that give you so much trouble. “La-lala-la,” you say, then practice rolling your R’s in the back of your throat as if gargling. Finally you pronounce your name again dividing the syllables, “Hel-len Kell-er. Errrr” you repeat multiplying the R. “Errr. Kell-errr. Hellen Kell-errr.” Teacher is watching you intently. She is momentarily so caught up in your exercises that when she steps forward, she is on the verge of saying, “Relax your tongue, Helen. Let it flatten out more.” Then she remembers. She stops at your side and lays a hand on your shoulder. You have been concentrating so hard, it is only at her touch that you know she is there. You let out one of your startling guffaws of laughter then say aloud, “Teacha! Yoo soopwised me.” Without thinking, she lifts your hand to her face and speaks into it, “Teacher,” she says. “Teach-er. Sur-prised.” But then she lowers your hand and spells into it. “I have some distressing news to tell you. I’ve received a telegram.”


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For some reason you know immediately. “Mother?” your hand asks. Then before she can answer, you say, “Dead?” Teacher lifts your hand, presses it to her face and nods once. You let your hand drop into your lap. You can’t say why this comes as no surprise. It should be a surprise. It’s not as if she’s especially old. She’s only what—sixty-something? And she has no serious health problems to speak of. She’s a lot healthier than Teacher, for instance. In her last letter to you, she made some veiled reference to her death, some phrase like: “. . . the time when I am no longer on this earth . . .” But it was too formulaic to raise any real alarm. “Mother, dead?” you think, as if testing yourself with the words, waiting for them to seem surprising or wrong. Suddenly, your right hand floats to your face and you pat your cheek. It happens automatically, without conscious thought. Patting your cheek was your sign for your mother all those years ago before Teacher taught you the word Mother. Teacher watches you do this and knows what it means. She hesitates, twisting her lips into a pucker, then takes your other hand gently, ready to say something; but you speak first, “Please leave me alone for a moment,” you say. She does not leave you alone, however. She does not want to leave you. She senses you may need her. She backs toward the door, then stops before opening it. She stands there, her hand on the doorknob, perhaps to prevent anyone else bursting in, and watches you. Maybe you are aware of this, maybe not. You pat your cheek again. Mother. But the gesture meant more than the name. Your signs for other people were all gestures that they habitually performed—your father reading the newspaper, your Aunt Ev tying her bonnet. Your sign for your mother was a gesture she did to you. It was an invitation, a plea for her to do it now. It meant “comfort” and “need comfort” and many other things. Perhaps it was the last gesture you ever saw her do, lying in your cot, as she leaned over and reached down to feel your temperature, to soothe your flushed cheek with her cool palm. In some deep crease of your brain, this image nestles—your mother’s young face pale with worry, her hair falling loose. And tucked in with this memory is the remembered sound of her voice saying, “Hush baby, Mama is right here.” You know these memories are inside your head somewhere, but it’s been too long since your eyes and ears worked for your brain to


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know what to do with them. So you learned to pat your cheek as a way to summon that soothing presence, that sensation of warmth and calm and comfort. The skin of your cheek under your patting hand remembers and re-creates her touch. Abruptly, you exhale a raspy sigh, which might be the preamble to a sob. It makes Teacher start and lean toward you ready to throw her arms around you. But you make no further sound. She squints at you, trying to see your expression, but she can only make out your general posture, which is erect, alert. Then you pat your cheek again. You are plunging backward through time. You latch onto the memories your brain has held the longest and haul yourself back to before you had language, when existence was all random sensation, back to when you were Phantom. Your memory of your mother at that time is of her body, its warmth and softness. You remember the voluminous folds of her skirts which you clung to, following her through her daily activities as a loose appendage. You remember the days of jammaking when you were drunk with the overripe berries she let you swipe and the thick, sugary steam. You remember kneeling in the garden next to her, your rough hands made gentle at the touch of the silky, fragrant petals of her prized roses. You can ascribe words to these memories now—strawberries, sugar, roses—but the intensity of the original sensations still clings to them. You savor it all again, your nostrils expanding, your fingers curling. There are more recent memories as well. You remember how much your mother loved to travel. She could always be counted on to accompany you on the lecture tours or, now, on the vaudeville circuit. She was often as excited as a child, and was as tireless as you. She loved San Francisco best of all cities. The last time you were there together, you took a boat tour around the bay and she described the scene rapturously to you: “Golden sunlight on the water . . . blue mist on the hills. . .” By that time, rheumatism had stiffened her fingers enough to slow her spelling. It also made it hard for her to braille letters to you, not that her brailling had ever been that rapid. But somehow, the constriction made her communications all the more precious. You read her letters as if they were lyric poems. You gathered up the four- and five-word phrases like rose petals, like fruit. You realize that the sadness you feel at this moment has been there a long time, an old grief. In a sense, you lost your mother years ago, or she lost you. Lost, you think, what do you mean by that? You hesitate. You are unsure you want to pursue this thought.


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And I’m unsure whether I want to pursue it either. Why? It’s you and this thought you balance in your brain, this thought of your mother and her loss. Her loss to you. Your loss to her, because as you wrote about it, that was how she felt. She never got over the fact that you went deaf and blind. All that you accomplished, all that she witnessed you do, was never enough to compensate her for the loss of the perfect seeing-hearing child that you were. This is no mere speculation on your part, either. You and she actually talked about it; she actually spoke the words to you directly, “I never got over . . .” No, that is a conversation I cannot imagine, will not imagine, because it would force me to imagine the conversation I never had with my own mother and, now that she is dead, never will. Is that how she felt about it, about me? Was my blindness a loss she never got over? I know that I, like you, was supposed to compensate my mother for the many disappointments in her own life. I was supposed to be perfect because the rest of her life was not. And then I turned out to be flawed too, imperfect too. This is so hard to write, Helen, so hard even to think, I don’t know how you did it. You’re tougher than I am, and maybe you were right. Maybe it’s better to have it out, to have the thing spoken. And there was something else for you too. There was Teacher. Yes, there she is, still standing at the door watching you. She cannot see your face, only the shadowy form of your body, which is motionless, erect, seemingly alert to something. And she knows what you’re thinking, too. But time is beginning to weigh on her. If you’re going to cancel the performance, she should let someone know. She’s not such a prima donna that she doesn’t think of such things. She looks at her watch. But since you are oblivious to the gesture, it does not make much of a hint. Again you pat your cheek. You realize that this is the last time you will ever make the gesture now that the response it summons has become impossible. Still, you do it anyway, one last time, wishing to fall backward through time again. But something stops you. You are aware suddenly that Teacher is in the room. She is there at the door. You feel her watching you, waiting. “What is she waiting for?” you think, and then, “Can’t she leave me alone for a single minute, even for this?” The abruptness of your anger summons first a thought and then another memory. The thought is that despite the fact that your mother never got over the loss of your sight and hearing, she was the one who insisted on finding you a teacher. The rest of your family, even your father, were ready


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to have you put away in an institution, and probably not a humane, educational institution like Perkins, but a warehouse of the unwanted where surely you would have languished, succumbed to disease—well, no one wants to think what would have happened to you in such a place. But your mother stood up to them, held out hope, insisted that they try one last thing. The memory is of an event that happened long ago. You were probably not present when it happened, but you learned about it later from your sister, Mildred, who’d heard it from your Aunt Ev. Your mother came into the house from the cook house, where she’d spent the entire day engaged in the arduous task of making lard. Despite outward appearances, Ivy Green was still a rather rugged place, where certain chores had to be supervised by the lady of the house. Though at the moment, she hardly felt like a lady. She felt bedraggled and weary. She was wearing her oldest dress and a coarse apron. Her hair was hanging loose and her face was flushed. Every part of her, her hair, her skin, her clothes, was covered with a thin coating of grease. She was thinking, as she often thought, that this was not the life she was raised to live. And the thought had nothing to do with you, Helen. It only had to do with the fact that while she considered it her duty to perform even the most menial and distasteful tasks, she’d grown up with different expectations. It was at such moments that your mother nursed a grudge against your father, whose dashing good looks and polished manners had misrepresented the style of life he could offer her. So she was nursing this and other grudges, and wanted only to strip off her clothes and scrub herself clean. As she was heading for her room, she met Teacher in the hall downstairs. Teacher, with her crisp shirtwaist, her carefully styled hair, and her rather haughty air from all the attention she enjoyed as your teacher. Teacher did not speak, but something showed in her face. Perhaps her lip curled slightly. Perhaps her eyebrow arched. Contempt has always come easily to Teacher. She considered your mother to be an ally, but otherwise had no particular respect or sympathy for her. Your mother was sensitive to this. She got it from all sides, living as she did under the constant scrutiny of her husband’s mother and two grown sons to whom her genteel Virginia upbringing and Adams family connection mattered little. And now, here was this uppity Yankee girl with her airs and her disdain. So whatever Teacher did or failed to do at that moment prompted your mother to pull herself up short, straighten her spine, and


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say, “Yes, I must look a fright. Lard-making is not the most important work in the world, but it is something that must be done.” You recall this as if you were there, as if the resentment your mother felt were your own. You know Teacher is there. You can feel her there watching you. What is she looking at? you wonder. Does she know what you’re thinking? For once, you hope she does. In this as in all things, Teacher is at the center. Teacher inserted herself between you and your mother all those years ago. She convinced your mother, and later convinced you, that it was the only way she could teach you. Now you wonder whether it was really so necessary. Did she really have to make you forsake all others? You feel something twist and tear inside you. You know it is but a mere aftershock of the pain your mother felt when she made that sacrifice in order to save you. You peel your hand off your cheek and hold it out in Teacher’s direction. She comes forward, saying, “Are you all right, Helen? Do you want me to cancel?” Your hand is surprisingly cold. Your fingers move with a deliberate precision that is utterly unlike you. “No,” you say. “No, I can go on. It’s something that must be done.” So you go on that night, and for numerous other nights. But your days in vaudeville are numbered. You have always known that your work in vaudeville is a far cry from the career you planned as a young woman just out of college. You were so young then, so earnest and idealistic. You thought you could change the world just by telling people what you thought. Now everything is different. You love vaudeville and feel privileged for the experiences it offers you, even as odd and disparate as they are; but at times, you’re not quite sure how you got here. And you’re not sure how long it can last. For one thing, your act will not always draw the crowds. Once someone’s seen it, they don’t need to see it twice. Also, the buzz up and down the circuit is that vaudeville is on its way out. It’s being replaced by movies and burlesque. Many of your fellow performers are abandoning vaudeville for nightclubs, for the legitimate and not-so-legitimate theater. Others are returning to the circus sideshows where they began. You’ve been to Hollywood and have no desire to go back. Burlesque? Part of you would love to suggest it to Teacher just to feel her response. You’d like to go back to writing, but you need time and calm, neither of which you ever have enough of anymore. But you have no aptitude for regret. You do what’s needed and keep going.


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November 11 Helen, Imagine my surprise when I was going through the mail just now and found a letter from you. Yes, there I was, reading return addresses with my closed-circuit TV reading device (not my favorite thing in the world, but it’s what I have), and I read “Helen,” then “Keller,” then “International.” Actually it took me a second to get to “International.” I got to “Keller” and lost it. My brain temporarily shut down from sheer disbelief. All this time writing all these letters to you and now, finally. . . I thought, “Can it be? Has she . . . ?” But of course you hadn’t. It is just an organization with your name. The letter goes on to tell me that “the spirit of Helen Keller lives on.” Like I need to know this. I scan the text and find some quotations from you: “Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it” (oddly worded), and: “All my life I have refused to accept blindness as a necessary part of existence” (whatever that means). Toward the end, the letter assures me that “Helen Keller would be very proud of the generous gift” they want me to make. My first impulse is to chuck it. I already give money to a bunch of blind organizations and charities: National Federation of the Blind, American Foundation for the Blind, Recordings for the Blind, the Seeing Eye and Guide Dog people. And the closing line doesn’t help: “Your generosity can help spare millions the agony of blindness.” Agony, Helen? You’re telling me this is agony? But the simple fact that your name is on the letter makes me read it through. It turns out that this organization is different from all those others. This organization works to prevent blindness in what used to be called “the third world,” which is identified here as “traditional societies.” Good phrase, Helen. No culturally insensitive hierarchical value judgments here. Your people are really up to the minute. Traditional societies means places like Indonesia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Morocco, Nepal, etc. We’re talking about diseases that are treatable or preventable here—cataracts, river blindness, trachoma (Teacher’s disease). There’s a brochure with pictures that I can’t see even with my magnification device. Not that I need to see them. I can imagine: a dark, smiling child holds the pale hand of the western missionary/physician, who administered eyedrops, provided vitamins,


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performed surgery, improved sanitation, or whatever the simple and comparatively inexpensive treatment is. You’ll be glad to know that your people know all the latest fund-raising ploys. There’s a box I can check to “Remember Helen Keller International in my will.” And there’s an insert telling me that “despite recent volatility in the stock market,” I can still “realize significant tax savings by making a gift of appreciated stock in lieu of cash.” Your people are so helpful and considerate. There’s even a prepaid envelope. Classy touch. I’ve got to hand it to you, Helen. You play me like a piano. You know that if I support causes for American blind people, I’ll have to support the international blind. Still, I feel manipulated. I feel you and your people know where all my buttons are and push them without mercy. You know where my affluent, first-world guilt resides, and that I won’t be able to resist the argument that for the price of a dinner out or some other self-indulgence, I can improve the lives of millions for whom an extra bowl of rice would be a sumptuous luxury. Needless to say, the check is in the mail. GK P.S. If I’m supposed to take this as some kind of personal sign to me, I don’t accept it. I’d prefer something a little less ambiguous, please. November 12 But this brings us to the final phase of your work life, Helen, your career as fund-raiser for the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB), which you took up in the mid-twenties, and continued pretty much for the rest of your life. I’m curious to know, first of all, how you decided to become the spokesperson for a blindness organization rather than one for the deaf. After all, you said more than once, and in print even, that you considered deafness the greater affliction for the way it impairs communication. On top of that, your long connection with A. G. Bell would have made it natural for you to ally yourself to that cause. But the deafness field has always been more complicated. There’s the whole issue of sign language versus speech, etc. Maybe you just didn’t want to get into it. Or maybe you simply knew that people are generally more sympathetic to the blind. They find the blind worthier objects of pity. Or perhaps it was just that the AFB got


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to you first, and knew to offer you a salary recognizing that you had been a vaudeville headliner for a number of years, and also that you were supporting both Teacher and Polly now, and that you all needed to maintain a certain image, a certain style of life. That was what Teacher preferred about the fund-raising period. You found yourselves again in the company of the right sort of people—philanthropists, captains of industry, educators, civic leaders. To her, it was a vast improvement over vaudeville. After all, she didn’t claw her way out of Tewksbury to spend her time rubbing shoulders with the equivalent of carnival performers and hoochy-coochy girls. But you, Helen? You were not happy. You liked vaudeville and were sad to give it up. In some sense, fund-raising felt like going backward to the lecture tour days. You had to return to the old pious tone. You found yourselves in the same church halls and municipal auditoriums, though now you also frequented executive offices, the corridors of power. And you’d gotten better at it. The years in vaudeville had improved your speech and refined your message. Your standard fund-raising pitch combined the high seriousness of your early lectures with the professional polish of the vaudeville act. But still, you did not like asking for money. Every now and then, it got to you and you would say, “I’m touting myself as an example of what the blind can achieve with proper education, and what am I? Nothing but another blind beggar, sticking out my hand, pleading for help.” “Yes, yes. Of course you’re right,” Teacher would say. But you could tell by the distracted detachment there that her hand was numb to your words. You knew about the end justifying the means. And you recognized that the problem with the vaudeville act was that while there was some value in showing people that you were a complete human being with a personality and sense of humor, it did not rouse anyone to specific social action. Fundraising, you told yourself, would benefit others. So you made the final refinements to your public persona and became the benign saint, using the story of your life to solicit cash for those less fortunate than yourself. Your new message was this: “With proper education and opportunity, any blind person can end up like me.” Did they believe this message? No. Of course they didn’t. You were a miracle, a one-of-a-kind, a freak occurrence. Your story would never be repeated. What’s more, while you talked about blindness, all they could think about was deafness. They were aware


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of your deafness because, even after all the years of working on it, your speech was still frequently unintelligible. Because you were forced to use your least-fluent mode of communication, you contradicted your own message. You left them with the impression that no amount of education could ever make you, or anyone remotely like you, Normal. You still needed Teacher to repeat your words. So they focused on Teacher. They identified with Teacher. The money they gave was to reward Teacher for sacrificing her life to aid you in what they thought might well be—except in exceptional cases like yours—a lost cause. Am I too harsh, too cynical? You shrug. “You don’t know the half of it,” you’d tell me. Like it or not, you ended up doing this work for forty years. I’m sure that what you learned about the psychology of charitable contributions would make my head spin. Later Here’s one last scene that comes to mind. It is 1926, 1927?—so hard to keep track. It’s Kansas City, Cleveland, Minneapolis—take your pick. It’s a garden party reception (so spring or summer) following your speech. Or else you will give your speech later. Tomorrow there will be either another speech or else a luncheon with the Lions Club, the Kiwanis Club, the Junior League. You will ceremoniously accept a sizeable check from the man who owns the factory, or the mill, or the mine. Then you will board the train and ride it to Des Moines, or Denver, or Detroit, and start the routine over again. So—a garden party reception. Ladies in hats. Tea, cakes, tea sandwiches—contents unknown. Teacher chats with matrons. The matrons admire and praise her. This is what she likes about fund-raising. Since the theme of your speeches is education, she is esteemed as the Distinguished Educator. During the lecture tours and the vaudeville circuit, too many people mistook her for the hired help. Thinking this makes her wonder where Polly has gotten to. She turns to look, but now a matron approaches and clasps her hand in both of hers. “I was moved to tears!” the woman gushes, “Your story, you and that poor child at that pump . . .” Teacher smiles, shakes her head, attempts to extricate her hand from the other woman’s moist grasp. “You’re too kind. I couldn’t take all the credit,” she says, though she’s perfectly happy to accept it when it’s offered.


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Then, because she knows it’s expected, she repeats the famous pump story, the words of her speech falling automatically from her lips. Such a good story, although at the time it happened, she barely distinguished that one event from a whole crowd of others. As she recites, she tries to recall how it really felt at the time. But somehow the words of the story have erased the memory, replaced it. She can summon an image of you as you were at six, an image of the dusty yard, the rusty pump. She says, “. . . and then the light of understanding shone in her face for the first time . . .” What do the words mean, she wonders idly. The light of understanding. She pictures your face as it was and tries to make it glow, as if there were a candle or a lightbulb inside your head. Is that something that actually shows, she wonders. At the time, all she could do was worry about the mug you dropped there at the pump, the way it exploded into fragments, yet another piece of broken crockery she would have to account for to your parents. When the story is over, the woman’s eyes glisten. “It was a miracle,” she breathes. “A miracle, truly!” Teacher tightens her lips. It is the standard response; but at times she would like, just once, to say, “Miracles had nothing to do with it.” In this mood, she observes that the woman’s jewelry is rather garish for daytime. Sunlight filters through the leaves overhead and sparkles off the gems in a way that hurts her eyes. She lowers her lids and massages them. “Yes, indeed, a miracle,” she murmurs. The woman gushes about you for a while, how beautiful you looked on stage, your luminous eyes. “The best money can buy,” Teacher mumbles. “I beg your pardon?” the woman asks. But now a broad, mannish woman shoulders her aside to confer with Teacher. She points out her daughter, a frothy wisp at the outskirts of the group, dreamily fingering the leaves of a willow tree. The mother wants her daughter to have a career. She thinks a young woman should have a career: It’s in keeping with modern times. She wants to know if Teacher thinks she could have a career in teaching. Teacher’s eyes are worse and worse. Still, to be polite, she squints through the sunlight toward the girl, but can only make her out as a pale pillar against a green background. Of course, even if she could see, she has no idea how an aptitude for teaching would manifest itself visually. She


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suspects the mother would do better just to buy the girl a house and a husband and let her live the only life she was suited for. “Of course teaching broke my health,” Teacher says and coughs delicately into her handkerchief. The woman looks concerned and moves to support her by the elbow, but Teacher shakes her off. “Nowadays, things are different. There are training colleges, scientific methods,” she says, though she has nothing but contempt for these. She thinks of teaching as an instinct and an art. “My method was based on intuition and observation,” she says, failing to add, “and the physical imperative to keep body and soul together since there was no other means of livelihood on my horizon.” After a few minutes, the woman excuses herself, brimming with Teacher’s expert opinion, leaving her alone to contemplate her surroundings. I know, Helen, that you think I am too hard on Teacher. You think I represent her as manipulative and controlling, shaping your life in ways that suit her selfish needs, recasting your message so the glory of public admiration shines exclusively on her. In fact, I admire Teacher, and for much more than her extraordinary contribution to education. I admire her because, in ways I think you never fully understood, she overcame much more than you did. And if the struggle of her early life made her harsh, calculating, and egotistical, it also made her iron-willed and practical in ways you never had to be, but which benefited your life immeasurably. Look at her there. She scans the scene, absorbing the few details her eyes can still perceive. The green grass and the pale fluttery fabrics of the ladies’ dresses summon a memory. She was perhaps four or five, back home in Feeding Hills, Massachusetts. She was carrying her father’s dinner to him in the field where he was working as a hired hand. As was her custom, she was cutting across the front lawn of Mr. Taylor, the farm owner, when a vision transfixed her. She could see then. Her eyes may have already begun to cloud from trachoma, but she could still see. What she saw was a party in progress, a strawberry festival. Then as now, the bright lawn was strewn with ladies in light party dresses and elaborate hats. But then, she had never seen anything like it. Such lovely ladies, such wonderful dresses. The ladies’ clothes were so exquisite, it was hard for her child’s mind to equate those beautiful colors and textures with the coarse stuff of her own garments. All she could do was stare, as if she’d walked into a place of enchantment that would vanish at the slightest sound or movement from her.


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One of the ladies caught sight of her and brought her a dish of strawberries and cream. She plunked right down on the grass and spooned it eagerly, luscious bite after bite, into her mouth. She was barely able to thank the lady, much less lift her gaze into the lady’s resplendent face. Like an animal, she did not question the bounty offered her but ate without stopping, as if to stop meant the bounty might be withdrawn. And she ate from hunger, without truly savoring the treat, because at the time, she was always hungry, too hungry to make fine distinctions about taste. It would be another dozen years before she would know what it felt like to eat her fill, or to prefer one food to another. As an adult, half a century later, the memory makes her squirm at her former self for showing so little dignity. And this twinge of reproach sparks another memory. She was fourteen, riding the train from Tewksbury to Perkins. She was completely blind then, accompanied by a man, some state employee, whose name she cannot recall and perhaps never knew. A lady sat down in the facing seat and engaged them in conversation. The man explained that the girl was blind, indigent, and he was escorting her to school. Then the lady gave her an apple and a piece of buttered bread. Again she ate as hungrily and unthinkingly as before. But she was older then, and understood why the lady offered her these gifts. Suddenly she felt acute shame at the calico dress she wore. It was the nicest dress she’d ever owned. It was red with black flowers, or so she’d been told. It had been made for her by a fellow Tewksbury inmate, from a dress taken off the body of one of the many women who had died in childbirth. Up until the lady offered her food, she’d felt proud of the dress. Now she recognized that the lady saw the dress as pitiable. In the same instant, she felt an urgent need to conceal her clumsy shoes under the seat, because she knew the lady’s shoes were probably neat and shiny and well-fitting. In accepting the lady’s gift, she found herself utterly transformed. A moment before, she had felt proud of herself, proud of her dress, proud to be on her way to Perkins and the promised life beyond. But to that lady, she was only an object of pity, a source of public shame. She was a hole in the perfect fabric of the universe, a hole that the lady wished to cover, to patch, with the small gift of food. This is why, Helen, when you raise your objections to doing this charity work, comparing it to begging, she dismisses it or snaps, “You don’t know a thing about it.”


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Teacher shakes off this memory, too. She is tired, tired of standing, tired of talking. Her face is tired of smiling. She looks around. “Where is Helen?” she thinks. “Typical! I turn my back for a minute and then, where is Helen?” She scans the gathering, the well-groomed lawn, the exuberant, somewhat over-planted flower beds, the ladies in hats all dappled with sunlight. She thinks, “Robin’s egg blue trimmed with yellow . . . moss green with ivory lace.” This is second nature to her now. As a matter of course, she absorbs visible details—those she can detect—in words, storing them up to deliver to you later. At last, she spots Polly in the group around the tea table, helping herself to more cake. But you are not with her. “Typical!” she thinks again, irritated with Polly, though she’s glad that you, for once, are not helping yourself to more cake. She is about to summon Polly to send her off to find you. “What else do we pay her for?” she grumbles inwardly. Then she sees you at the far end of the garden, sitting by yourself on a stone bench near a stone birdbath. She knows it’s you from the color of your dress. It’s a deep iris blue. She’d observed earlier how it made you stand out against all the pastels here. She starts toward you, thinking, “This will never do—the guest of honor off by herself this way.” As she draws nearer, she notices that there’s a bird in the birdbath. It flutters and splashes in the water. The late sunlight catches the droplets of spray it throws off, making them sparkle. She notices that you are sitting very still. Your spine is very erect, and your face is aimed directly at the bird in the water. Then, very slowly, you lift your hands off your lap and extend them toward the birdbath, palms foremost, as if reaching out to warm them at a fire. Seeing this, Teacher halts mid-stride. Her irritation and fatigue are replaced suddenly by wonder. The wonder of you, even after all these years. She stands watching you, transfixed, wondering, “How does she do it? How does she know it’s there?” In fact, you do know the bird is there. You felt the breeze it made as it circled, then came in to land. That’s why you’re sitting so still. You don’t want to scare it away. You are alert and have felt no breeze of departure, so you’re sure it’s still there. You hope it’s a cardinal. You would like it to be a cardinal, or an oriole—a red bird in a stone basin. A flake of fire, you think. Where did that phrase come from? A poem by someone. Oliver Wendell


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Holmes, wasn’t it? Something you memorized as a child. A flake of fire. You like the phrase. “Flake” is good. You think of paint chips flaking off the house. You remember picking them up and being startled to find them so brittle, breaking into powder at your rough touch. “Paint?” you thought at the time and compared the feel of those flakes to the remembered feel of the sticky, viscous paint in the bucket. Which house was that? Ivy Green probably. By the time you had the house in Wrentham, you already knew enough not to remark on such things. A flake of fire in a basin of stone. A flake of fire, bathing. Fire, water— opposition, you think. Is the fire extinguished by the water? Does the flake dissolve back into a damp blob of paint? You lift your hands and reach toward it. You cup your hands as if holding a sphere, as if hoping to catch the bird and the space around the bird. But you would not try to catch the bird. You are only trying to catch the spray as he shakes the water from his body. The bird dips and plunges. He flutters his tail feathers and fluffs out his wings. You hold your hands still around all this motion. The skin of your palms interprets the pattern of droplets made by each new movement. The water hitting your palms is cool, the sunlight is warm. You wonder if the spray the bird throws up into the sunlight makes a rainbow. You hope it does. You know the light must make the spray at least golden—a sparkling golden haze, and at its center that red, hot, spot of life. Teacher sees all this, and it makes her heart ache. She wants to reach out and embrace you, but she stands motionless, watching, waiting. She doesn’t know exactly what you are thinking; she imagines it’s something about language, some pun or word play. She knows your every mood and mannerism. She knows that you find this fund-raising work wearisome. It drains your spirit and deflates your pride. She entertains the possibility that she was wrong to get you to sign on for this. She knows you wish you could go back to your life as a writer, but she witnessed your disappointment over the reception of your early work. As hard as you tried to conceal it from her, she knew how devastated you were by the repeated charges that it was all ghostwritten. It was “The Frost King” trial all over again. She knows how much that hurt you. She fumes about it still. Teacher sighs, still watching you. She knows if she touches your arm, you will get up without complaint and return to the party, saying, “Sorry, Teacher, I guess I lost track of time.” But she wants to give you another


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minute of solitude and peace. She knows what these people would make of this, how ready they are to turn you into something mystical. You are only daydreaming, resting as anyone would. But people are unwilling to accept that anything you do is ordinary. She has a hard time reconciling the various ways others perceive you. Some dismiss you as an overgrown child or well-trained pet. Others think of you as a superhuman or a saint. There are times she feels she is the only person alive who knows exactly what you are. “I will not let them make Helen a prodigy,” she’s said often enough, even to you, though you never understood what she meant. You thought being a prodigy was the point. But Teacher knows that you are a human being, plain and simple. As it happens, you neither hear nor see, so you make do, as human beings will. You are, yes, smarter than most people, and certainly more energetic. You have a remarkably even and resilient disposition. There are times she, like me, finds your disposition perplexing, even annoying. At times she, like me, even wishes she shared it. She wishes she was a little less plagued by mood swings, a little less subject to resentment and rage. But the fact remains, you are no miracle. Here, right here, is the greatest gift she gave you. You see, I do understand her better than you think, better maybe even than you did. She chose the comfortable middle path of philanthropy. It lets them put you on a pedestal, but one that is neither too high nor too precarious. Giving money makes them feel good about themselves, so they don’t look at you too deeply and discover that there’s more to you than that. Or less. She watches you, the bird still content inside the loose embrace of your hands. A small smile softens her face, smoothing the bitter pucker of her mouth. Even after all these years, even with all her weariness at all these years, of work and worry and old resentments, you can still make her smile. “What are you thinking, Helen?” she whispers out loud, allowing herself to play the old game. She asks, “What’s going on inside that head of yours?” because she knows that is the only place where wonders reside. You are only as miraculous as every other human being who ever drew breath. She is grateful to have you as a daily reminder of this. “Will you speak to the bird? Will the bird speak back?” But these possibilities are too ordinary, too mundane. Someone with your imagination would surpass these ordinary possibilities. “What now, Helen?” she thinks. “What next?”


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part four

The Hand’s Memory Next, Helen? You know what’s next. You say, “Not that. Anything but that. Not again.” I’m writing this on a stormy day. The wind must be blowing forty miles an hour. It makes me feel unsettled, uneasy, even a little afraid. There could be power lines torn down by falling limbs. I think I should shut down my computer and pull the plug. I wish I were not alone. I would like to talk to someone, but I can think of no one I want to call. You see, Helen, I don’t want to go through it either. I’ve only just come to a kind of understanding about Teacher, and now I’m ready to do away with her? No, I’m not ready, but it’s something we have to go through. You know we do. From the moment you first learned the word death as a child, you knew you would have to witness hers. And in a way, she’s had you convinced she was on the verge of death for at least twenty years, longer even. So you’d been preparing for it all that time. Something would happen— they’d take her to the hospital—and you’d think, “This must be it. The end.” But then she’d recover and come home and be all right for a while. Sometime that summer of 1936, you rented a cottage on the beach somewhere on Long Island for her to get some rest. One day she felt so well she walked down to the water, telling you she felt like a swim. But the instant the water hit her ankles, she collapsed in a heap and an ambulance was called. You were sure, absolutely positive, that this time it must be the end. But then it wasn’t. She got better. Fall came, and you all went back home to Forest Hills. So when the actual end came, you were not prepared. It seemed like just another crisis, not the final crisis. After the fact, you wrote of “the eight hour struggle to catch her breath,” but it wasn’t as if it started at a particular hour when you could say for a certainty, “This is it, the beginning of the end.” And those eight hours played out second by second, each 157

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second announcing itself as the last, followed by another second announcing itself the same way, with no letup, the tension in your body and your brain always bracing for the cataclysmic final second only to find another and another playing out hour after hour. You felt her struggle for breath, her gasps and coughs, as convulsive jerks and spasms. Her rib cage bucked in a way that did not feel quite human, as if some creature were trapped inside her chest, hurling itself headfirst against that cage of bone. All the while you massaged her neck and shoulders, struck anew at all the weight she’d lost since—when? When exactly had that begun? All you knew was that each time you touched her, there was a split second when she felt unfamiliar. It was not the fleshy, bloated body that had inflated around her during middle age. And it was not the tense, wiry body of her when she was young. You felt her bones under her skin as you had when she was young, but there was none of the taut elasticity there had been in the young body. The joints felt lax, the very surfaces of the bones felt rough through the thin layer of skin, as if they could wear right through from the inside out. A lot of this time, she could not speak to you. Her hands were busy clutching at her mouth, her throat, or reaching out into space for you, for Polly, for drugs—you didn’t always know for sure. At times you kept repeating the question, “What can I bring you, Teacher?” saying it aloud or into her hand. But mostly you said nothing. You stroked her hand, trying to still the uncontrollable bucking of her body, trying to keep her hand warm. Every once in a while, her hand twitched in a way that meant she was trying to speak to you. Her fingers would curl and stretch into one or two letters, then falter. Or you would smell her warm, stale breath in your face, in measured puffs different from the frantic gasps, and your hand would fly to her lips. But there would only be a syllable or two of nonsense. Each time you thought, “The last? The last?” and then it was not the last, not yet. Then there were also many moments of lucidity, eight and ten minutes at a time when you were actually talking together. You remember saying something like, “Life is beginning over again, glorious in light and peace.” You were talking about her death, of course. You were trying to express something about your belief in an afterlife, your faith that death meant reunion with lost loved ones. You also believed that in the afterlife, you

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would see and hear again. At least that was what you said. I suspect it was just a way of expressing the wonder you anticipated in words that the Normals could understand. The point was that you would all be together again. What difference would it make to see and hear them? But since she had never really accepted her own blindness, maybe you thought it would help to promise her restored sight. I know you wish she had been able to speak the whole time, but it may be just as well she didn’t. Sometimes when people are deprived of oxygen for a long time, they become deluded. They rant, say things they don’t mean, things that will stay with you, torment you, but which you will never be able to puzzle out. My father died that way, Helen. I can’t tell you the things he said. I mean, I can’t bring myself to write the words. I try not to think about it, don’t want to derive some ultimate, final message from words spoken when he was not himself. I think that more often than not, the “last words,” the privileged last utterance, may be something no one was ever meant to hear. For instance, Teacher expended a lot of those last hours ranting about Jimmie, her little brother who died when they were both children at Tewksbury. You tried to recall what she’d told you about him, how it was his death that had made it impossible for her to believe in an afterlife or anything to do with any sort of god. You said, “Yes, Jimmie will be there. You and Jimmie will be together again. You and Jimmie and . . .” But she said only, “Look Jimmie, they let me bring you flowers.” And then, “I’ll make them give you a blanket. You’re cold as ice.” And you felt a pang of betrayal in this. Why should she be thinking of her brother dead these sixty years, thinking of anyone or anything but you? But then the next minute, her hand would jump out of yours as a new spasm of wheezy coughs started again. You thought she was trying to catch her breath, to hold onto life. Maybe the truth is that it was a struggle for death. Like a suicide seeker who throws herself under the waves only to keep bobbing to the surface again and again with the stubborn ballooning of her lungs, she was struggling to cross over, to walk into that alien medium and cease to exist in this one. But her body, oblivious to her desires, knew only the imperative to keep breathing, to keep itself alive. So it went, second after second, the seconds piling up into minutes. Then there were hours, eight hours, you calculated later. Then something

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new happened. Her body was still, more or less, but vibrating at a new frequency. You lay your hand against her sunken chest. She was breathing in a regular way now. Her chest rose and fell against your hand in a controlled rhythm. But with each exhalation, there was a rattle inside, a fluttery rasping vibration like when you held a cricket inside your cupped palms. For a few seconds, you wondered if this new vibration might be snoring. Maybe danger had passed and she had fallen asleep. But the vibration was more intense and in a different place than snoring. You took her hand in yours, letting it lie gently inside your palm. For a second, it rested there lightly, as if poised to speak, as if she were forming words in her mind before forming them in her fingers. Then her hand collapsed into yours. You felt the warmth in her hand, already faint, start to recede from the warmth of your hand. You could almost feel it sucked up her arm into her body which, you knew without touching, was no longer breathing, no longer feeling, no longer her. You held onto her hand, or what had been her hand and was now only a strange, clammy, five-fingered thing. Your hand remembered that hand of fifty years ago. One summer day when you were maybe eight or nine, she took you to the chicken house and picked up an egg for you to touch. This was nothing new to you; you’d touched chicken eggs before, and turkey eggs, even some robin’s eggs you found in a nest in a tree you were climbing. Still, she made you touch it, and as you did, you felt it move. It quaked and rolled on her palm. Then she placed your finger lightly against a place on the shell, and you felt the hard tapping from within, then a sharp sting to your fingertip like the prick of a blunt needle, so you almost drew your hand away. But you kept it there to feel the shell shatter, the sticky fragments falling away, until the damp writhing creature shook itself free and unfolded into her palm. Then she tipped it into your hand. You felt the fragile impact of its claws. It wobbled unsteadily, and you cradled it until it found its balance, shaking itself first uncertainly, then with more vigor, into a downy ball of fluff. You stood transfixed, the brand new chick cupped loosely inside your hands, feeling it grow warm and soft, and substantial. Your mouth was open, your eyes shut, your shoulders hunched up around your ears in tense, wordless wonder. Helen, she must have seemed like God to you. She made life happen in her hands. How then could she ever die and leave you alone? Then someone pried your hand out of the corpse’s hand, and they led you away so they could prepare the body. You know this happened but you can’t

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remember it. Where did they take you? Your bedroom? What did you do there? You have no memory. That part is blank. The next thing you remember is they led you back in and you touched her face, only now it was definitely not her face. It was not anyone’s face, only a cold, unnaturally smooth and unyielding surface. And there was a smell in the room, masked under the scent of lilies and perfume and disinfectant. Your nose peeled back the layers and knew the scent. And your body recoiled in an atavistic revulsion. Instinctively you reached for her to shield her from what every living organism recognizes, fears, and flees. But your hand found nothing but the cold, inert form, a ludicrous mockery of a living body, utterly unrecognizable to your touch. You drew back, reaching for someone, Polly or anyone else who was there. Your fingers formed the hurried words, “It’s not Teacher.” At first it was a simple statement of fact that you felt should be laughably obvious to anyone who’d ever known Teacher. But when the statement received no corroboration, you said it again, “It’s not Teacher. Where is . . .” Without any conscious prodding, your brain was racing ahead, outrunning logic, straining for the conclusion that Teacher still was somewhere, perhaps borne away to the hospital or to another room, and that this thing supine on her bed was nothing to do with her. Hands were on your shoulders, forming words in your hands. But you didn’t want the comfort of that contact, and didn’t want to receive their words. You broke free, twined your fingers into a knot, locking your palms away from the words you knew were true but didn’t want to feel spoken. You shook your head, your mouth falling open and sounds escaping, a deep groan brought up like bile from below your ribs, then rising to a piercing wail, higher and shriller than a hearing voice can make, “Idz nod Teetcha! Idz nod Teetcha! Idz nod!” Then the next thing you knew, you were sitting in your attic study, the drafty room Teacher never liked. You were rubbing your hand against the rough tweed of your skirt, trying to rub away the sensation of that face that was not a face, that corpse that had never been a body, never been her body. You rubbed until the skin of your palm began to tingle. Then you rubbed the wooden arm of your Morris chair, almost hoping you could raise a splinter and callous the skin of your palm to insensibility. At the same time, you also knew you were effacing the touch before that touch, the feel of her hand as she tried and failed to press some final words into yours. But all you could remember was feeling that vital warmth, the energy that made her hand unmistakably hers, drain up her arm into the core of

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her body, where it condensed into a tiny speck of dust and disappeared, leaving nothing but the worn-out, useless body behind. Why, you wanted to know, why couldn’t you keep the spirit and discard the body? You understood why she would want to part with the body that had always been so painful to her. But why . . . ? And then the thought occurred to you, as it occurs to everyone in mourning, that this was only a test, another trial, something else you were going to have to submit to and survive. Yes, that must be it, you told yourself. It was another challenge, more adversity to overcome. And sure, you could do this. Hadn’t you spent your entire life overcoming the impossible? Isn’t that what everyone told you all the time? And when you did this new impossible thing, when you went through all the private and public ceremonies, displaying your grief in all the prescribed ways, then, somehow, she would reward you with her return. You sustained yourself with this thought through the funeral, the cremation, the memorial service at the Washington Cathedral. They all recorded the image of you at the various ceremonies, with Polly by your side. She was sobbing openly, barely able to stand. Your eyes were moist, but you were composed, supporting her, your hand spelling words of consolation into hers. That’s what they saw. But it was not simple stoicism, not courage, as everyone assumed. Inside your head you were saying, “OK, Teacher. I can do this. I can do this impossible thing, too. Whatever it takes. Just watch me. Watch me!” January 27 But you survive. That’s the astonishing thing. For as long as you can remember, you’ve wondered, “How will I live without Teacher?” And you were not the only one. Everyone who knew you asked the same question: “How will Helen survive without Teacher?” And yet here you are, surviving. You wake each morning, convinced this is only another bad dream, another version of the nightmare you’ve had since childhood. And then you discover it is not, or at least that the nightmare is continuing. So you get out of bed. You perform tasks. You fulfill obligations. You meet people for meals. You keep up with your correspondence. You keep up your appearance. You keep your chin up. Then you go to bed at night and wonder, “Isn’t this long enough yet? Haven’t I proved myself yet?”

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The other surprising thing is Polly. She’s been with you now since 1914, twenty-two years. You know her. You are familiar with all her moods and limitations. But in all that time, you never really imagined what it would be like to live with her alone. You’ve always thought of her as Teacher’s assistant. She was hired to take over tasks Teacher found too taxing. You thought of Polly as your ally, your coconspirator in the care and maintenance of Teacher. Most of your daily contact with Polly revolved around managing Teacher, monitoring her state of mind, preserving her strength, cajoling her into following doctor’s orders. Over the years, her duties expanded, of course. She took turns interpreting for you, as John used to do. She even took Teacher’s place on stage, first on a couple of vaudeville dates then, later, and more frequently, at fund-raising events. But you never thought of it as a permanent arrangement. In a vague way, you’d always assumed that when Teacher died, Polly’s job would be over. For that reason, you had never perceived the need to forge an independent relationship with her. But now here she is, and the expectation seems to be that she will stay on with you. You are like two acquaintances who find themselves shipwrecked on a desert island. You both work hard to remain calm, anxious to keep the other from panic or despair. You tell each other that you will survive this, that eventually someone will rescue you. You make a go of things, throw up a shelter of some sort, gather fruit, learn to spear fish. But at the same time, you can’t help thinking, “Can this really be it? Can this really be the person who will share the rest of my life?” You would never admit it to anyone, but you and Teacher used to make fun of Polly in private. Teacher told you how when Polly was called upon to interpret for you on stage, she would drop her natural Scotch burr (which was the reason Teacher hired her in the first place) and adopt a high-tone English accent, and do a funny thing with her head, wobbling it back and forth on her neck as if it were as much of a physical effort for her to speak as it was for you. Teacher could have you in stitches when she described this, though you knew it was terribly mean and that Polly would have been mortified if she ever found out. You have a lot of sympathy for Polly. You know that most of her pretensions come from her feelings of inadequacy. But you have never thought of her as a friend, certainly not as a replacement—not that anyone could replace Teacher.

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And yet here you are, surviving, with Polly. So you go on. You sail for England and spend a few months with Polly’s brother in Glasgow. You visit schools and institutions. You give a few lectures. You become obsessed with the king’s abdication; you think it’s wrong. You pay attention to the situation in Germany. They burned your books in ’33. All this outrages and saddens you. You go to Paris to help launch their version of Talking Books. You’re not in favor of Talking Books because of what you fear they will do to funding for Braille, and how that would disadvantage the deaf-blind. But it’s a politically necessary compromise. You astound yourself whenever you express these opinions; it’s not as if any of it really matters to you. Or does it? It’s like you’re sleepwalking. Periodically you wake to discover yourself showing interest, expressing opinions, conversing in an animated way about one thing or another. You think, “This is odd. Do I really care about this?” You even start writing again, a journal that you decide to publish as a book, expanding the daily entries with set-piece portraits of various people you mention. It makes for strange reading, I have to tell you, Helen. But I recognize it was something you needed to do. You’ve been so preoccupied with Teacher’s health, it’s been more than seven years since you’ve published anything substantial. You do all this tentatively, as if you’re testing the ice. You take tiny steps away from the shore where you know the ice is thickest. You are alert to any hint of instability underfoot. You are astonished by how far you get. You acknowledge your own progress, saying, “OK. I can do this without Teacher. I can meet these people. I can give a lecture. I can write a book. All these things I can still do, without Teacher.” You don’t admit it to anyone, but you feel anger about this. She’d always led you to believe it would be impossible for you to complete a book without her. And then you do it anyway. It’s different, of course. Polly has no editorial skill, but she can proofread. And there’s Nella Braddy Henney, Teacher’s biographer and your editor at Doubleday. Nella is easy to work with; she actually defers to you. She certainly doesn’t argue over every word the way Teacher used to. So the book gets done. Maybe it would have been better with Teacher’s input, maybe not. But you find yourself fuming for days. She’d convinced you it was much harder than this, that she was much more integral to the process. You don’t talk about the anger, of course. You hate yourself for feeling it, hate the way you find yourself reinterpreting your whole life

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in new ways. Various people suggest you should write a book about Teacher. Given your current mood, you know that any book you would write about Teacher would shock the world. This thought feels spiteful. It makes you feel guilty. But it’s there just the same, boring a hole in you where all those other feelings about her used to be. Used to be—it’s the moments when you recognize her absence that make the wound fresh again. Along with the anger there is a kind of relief that you don’t talk about either. So much of your life has centered on taking care of Teacher, worrying about Teacher, making everything right for Teacher. Since childhood, the anxiety could wake you in a cold terror: “What if Teacher is really sick this time? What if Teacher is really angry? What if Teacher . . . ?” This still happens; old habits die hard. Now when it happens, you console yourself with the reminder that Teacher can never be angry or sick or anything ever again. You still find it hard to believe this, especially when you’re alone late at night, because you still feel the connection so powerfully. It’s as if there’s a steel cable attached to one of your lower ribs. While Teacher lived, she tugged on this. Now the connection is still there, but you feel no pull from the other end. Then you begin to notice that a lot of things are easier. It’s not just that the constant anxiety is gone; you’re the one who makes the decisions now. For instance, when you come back from Europe and walk into the Forest Hills house, the first thing you say is, “We’ll have to sell this.” You say it because as you walk from room to room, you feel Teacher’s presence. You even smell her there, even though all her clothes and personal things have been removed. And it’s not a happy presence. She never liked that house. So you make the decision and it happens. One of the trustees at the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) loans you a house in Westport, Connecticut, and then builds you another one there. It’s quite a lavish house, larger than you need, built for large-scale entertaining or at least a large family. But there’s a nice sunny study for you, and an extensive garden where they install railings so you can walk around on your own. You accept all this graciously, gratefully. It’s a bit surprising given your early resistance to charitable patronage. I guess all those years of fund-raising had weakened your resolve. If Teacher were still around, everything would have been so much more complicated. Not that she was opposed to accepting money from people: Remember all the trouble between you about the Carnegie pension. But in the last couple of years, she had begun to mistrust the AFB

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crowd and its affiliates, so she would have felt that the gift came with too many strings attached. And then once she was persuaded to accept the gift house, she would have wanted to oversee the design, and would have bitterly criticized some of the construction choices. Polly has some of these complaints, but they’re nothing to the fuss Teacher would have made. Since you are the one in charge now, you get to travel to your heart’s content; with Teacher, travel had become almost impossible. You go to Japan on a lengthy lecture tour. Teacher could barely tolerate Europe—Japan would have been out of the question, with the strange food and the communal bathing and the funny beds on the floor. You return, then take a trip to Africa, then back to Europe, then back and forth across North America. All of a sudden, you discover it’s 1940, then 1941. Time seems to be passing more quickly, you observe, or maybe it’s just that you are still sleepwalking most of the time. You still wake each morning (or maybe it only happens every few months) and ask, “How much longer do I have to keep this up alone? Isn’t this enough? Isn’t it time for her to come back?” During the war, you visit military hospitals. You actually enjoy the work. And in spite of the highly staged quality of these appearances, with all the reporters and newsreel cameras in your wake, you wow them everywhere you go. You genuinely like all those boys. They are so brave and brash and vulnerable and earnest. You feel positively maternal. You are very brisk and busy. You show a blind one how to read Braille. You discuss depression with a double amputee. You make them all laugh with some of your vaudeville antics. You get them to tell you their favorite jokes, though Polly refuses to transcribe anything off-color. To get around this, you read their lips when her back is turned. You fluff up their pillows. You tuck in their blankets. When you’re gone, the doctors and nurses all exclaim over all the good you’ve done. They marvel at your gift for nurturing. “Gift?” you scoff inwardly when these remarks are quoted in the papers. “All those years keeping Teacher alive would turn anyone into Florence Nightingale.” Then the war is over. It’s 1945, 1946. You begin to suspect that they have reduced the number of days in a year. What else can explain how fast time passes? The days seem shorter, but the nights seem twice as long. People keep asking about your book about Teacher. “It’s been ten years,” they say, as if this were a reason. You say, “I’m pulling together my notes.” But instead you go to Europe to visit the war wounded there. The devastation chills you. You think, “It’s a good thing Teacher isn’t here to see this.” Your

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sleep-deprived brain latches onto this idea and you follow through, thinking, “But now that it’s over, she’ll . . .” Then you get word that the house in Westport has burned down. It’s more of a blow to Polly than to you. It was just a house to you. No house ever mattered to you after Wrentham, but this was the nicest house Polly ever lived in. She’d thought of it as her house, full of her treasures. You pat her sobbing shoulder when she hangs up the phone there in the Athens hotel room. You will decide later that this is the beginning of the end for Polly. But at the moment, you are mystified, perplexed. “How could the house burn down when we weren’t even there? What can it mean?” you think. “Is it a sign from Teacher?” January 29 Is it a sign from Teacher? That’s a good question. Do you believe in such things, Helen? And here’s a side observation while we pause to muse over this: I observe that there were a great many fires in your life, Helen, a good many more than in the average life, as far as I can calculate. There was the fire at your sister’s house after the Peter Fagan affair we’ve already discussed. And the fire in which Teacher burned her journal. There was the fire John started smoking in bed at the flat in Boston. There was no real damage to the building, no injuries. But you and Teacher had clothes and things that you had to get rid of because of the smoke. Long before that, there was a fire back home at Ivy Green a few months before Teacher came. You had spilled some water on yourself and went to stand close to the fireplace in the parlor to dry your clothes. A spark flew out and ignited your pinafore. Fortunately a servant was passing. She wrapped you in a blanket and smothered the flames before you got hurt. It was a close call, though. Your eyebrows got singed, and some of your hair. Do you remember it, Helen? You remember the smell of burning hair and the light feathery feel of the flames flowing over the surface of your clothes before the heavy wool thwump of the blanket thrown over your head. What am I to make of all these fires? Teacher liked fire. As we’ve already established, she was one of those people who can never get enough warmth. But she liked fire in particular. In the first couple of years at Wrentham, when they were doing all the renovations on the house, she liked to build bonfires to burn the construction refuse. Summer evenings after supper, the

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three of you, and anyone else who happened to be staying there, would sit around for hours. Sometimes John would read or recite things to you. Or you would just talk about whatever was on your minds. It would get later and later and Teacher would keep throwing things on the flames, keep prodding it with a long stick. Gradually, whatever guests were there would drift off to bed. Then John would make a big show of yawning and kiss you both good night. You would be yawning too by then, but you would stay with her. She never talked much. You felt her staring into the fire. You would feel the heat of the fire on her face, and in her hair. The smoke stung your nostrils every time she poked the embers with her stick. “What are you thinking?” you asked sleepily. She never answered. You never expected her to. “Come on,” you’d say, tugging on her arm, “There’s work to do tomorrow.” “Let it burn out,” she’d say, if she said anything. “Oh, come on Teacher,” you’d say, starting to rise. “It’s late. I’ll get some water.” “No,” she’d say. “Let it burn out.” January 30 “Let what burn out?” you wonder. Is that the message? You stand on the deck of the liner taking you home, trying to get your mind around the event. The sea is rough. The wind in your face is brisk and wet with spray. There are few people on deck. Polly is down in the cabin, lying on her bed, sobbing. You search your mind carefully but find that you do not share her grief. You have no particular attachment to that house and you have no particular attachment to material things in general. You enjoy the comfort and convenience of some, and a few have sentimental meaning, but beyond that, you don’t concern yourself much. So if this fire is supposed to unhinge you, it has certainly missed its mark. Here are the things of value you lost in the Westport fire: Your library, thought to be one of the most extensive private Braille libraries in the world. Your wardrobe, though you had most of your favorite clothes with you. An ostrich feather given to you by William James. The bas-relief of Homer that used to hang in your study. Your best gardening gloves.

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Your toboggan. A locket containing a lock of hair, perhaps your mother’s? A scrap of cloth that had once been a part of your first doll, Nancy. Your first Braille slate and stylus. Your first typewriter, a Remington with the changeable cartridges, which you’d used since you were ten. A shepherd’s crook from Scotland. The mantle clock that was Dr. Bell’s wedding gift to Teacher. A silver whisky flask that was a gift from Mark Twain. Teacher’s wire-rimmed, smoked glasses. Your first pair of glass eyes, the ones Teacher always said were too blue. Letters from every American president since Cleveland. Letters from various queens. Love letters from . . . ? The pink satin sash Teacher wore when she graduated from Perkins. The yellow sash of your father’s Confederate uniform. A piece of lace made by Laura Bridgeman. The Morris chair where you liked to read. A box of your mother’s recipes. A box of hybrid tulip bulbs you’d planned to plant. Some fragments of sandstone containing fossil impressions of leaves and bird footprints. Some fragments of stone from the wall at Wrentham. Your sense of rootedness. Your sense of home. The skeletons in all your closets. And the manuscript of your book about Teacher. How much of a manuscript did you have, Helen? “Notes,” you say in an offhand way when you get back from Europe and are touring the remains of the house. “Bits and pieces, certainly not even enough to call a book.” No one believes you; they think you’re just being stoical again. They’re all astonished by how calm you are. You pick your way around the rubble that used to be your home with detached interest, as if this were only some archaeological dig. Probably you’re in shock, they think. You’re certainly in a lot better shape than Polly. She’s sobbing continuously. In fact, she sobbed continuously through the entire crossing. Every now and then she

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picks up something from the ashes and debris, a charred scrap of wallpaper or painted wood that identifies it as belonging to a specific room, and lets out a wail so shrill and piercing it makes even you wince. The detached garage is still standing. In it, they have assembled the little that’s been salvaged—pots and pans mostly, and a few other noninflammable things, though much of it is now misshapen and discolored. There are also a few random pieces of furniture that survived the flames, but most of it is irreparably damaged by smoke or water. Miraculously, there are scraps of books and other papers. Nella Henney lovingly combed through the ashes and collected everything there was. She shows you a box full of Braille pages. You leaf through it idly, scanning a line or two on a few sheets. Nella hovers near you anxiously. “That’s everything we could find,” she tells you apologetically. “I couldn’t tell what it all was. It looks like the sort of paper you use, not pages from books.” “Yes,” you say. “I think most of it must have been on your desk and scattered when the windows blew out. I remember you always kept notes and jottings in that box on the edge of your desk. So I thought it must be . . .” You like Nella. You’ve known her a long time, and she understood and admired Teacher as well as anyone did. At times, however, you find her overly reverential about you, about your work. You appreciate all she does for you and know she means well, but it makes it hard to consider her a true friend. She says, “I thought it must be the book.” “The book,” you think, as if there really were such a thing. You don’t know what to tell her. If you tell her that she’s salvaged most of the manuscript, she’ll expect you to finish the book and show it to her. Perhaps it would be best to tell her that you have actually not been working on a book about Teacher, that the last thing you want to do is write a book about Teacher, and that the only reason you pretended to be writing one was to get everyone to leave you alone. You are suddenly conscious that some of the AFB crowd is there, the group of self-appointed guardians, or Trustees, as you’ve come to call them, knowing that the word has something to do with prison guards. Some of them can read Braille. You draw Nella closer so no one can see your hands. “You didn’t show any of this to anyone?” “No, of course not!” she says. Nella is a very sensitive person, and very loyal. “I would never. I didn’t know what was there. I wanted you to look at it first.”

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“Good,” you say. “Thank you,” but you say no more. They rebuild the house. You would have been content with a smaller, more modest house, even an apartment somewhere, as long as there was a park nearby. But Polly wants it rebuilt exactly as it was, only with an updated kitchen. Since it’s a decade later, it costs a lot more and takes a lot of time. But when it’s done, there’s nothing left for you to do but to write the book about Teacher. All the while you are writing it, you dream of fire. You feel the breathcatching heat of a foundry furnace you visited once as a child. You feel it glowing on your face, drawing the sweat out of your pores and evaporating it, pulling the blood to the surface of your skin. You feel it suck the moisture out of your nostrils and throat so you can smell and taste nothing but heat. It is a heat so intense it terrifies you, kindling the impulse to flee deep inside your body. But it also thrills you, draws you toward it. You wake from these dreams chilled and ready to run. But where, which way? That’s how you know it’s a dream. “Only a dream,” you reassure yourself. And then that sensation of dread takes hold of you again, and you get up, go to your desk, and write about her. Writing about her only makes it worse, but you cannot stop yourself. You start suffering from various skin complaints—rashes and eczema— which you make worse by scratching and picking. Then you start to lose your hair, in part because you are over seventy now and hair is one of the many things a body starts to lose. But it’s also because you spend so much time during the day twisting and tearing it. You become conscious that you are doing this only when you feel the old, nagging anticipation that at any moment Teacher will find you this way and tell you, “Stop fussing with your hair, Helen!” And that is yet another reminder that Teacher will not, can not, do any such thing, which makes you give your hair an extra yank. While you are upstairs working, Polly and Nella are downstairs watching the McCarthy hearings on television. You feel mildly ashamed that you are not more interested. Over dinner, they will give you the details, and you will express dismay and outrage. Inwardly, you feel miffed that no one has thought to point a finger at you. True, you never joined the Communist Party, but you were a socialist and used to consort with all sorts of radical types. The FBI has a file on you. Some considered your work to aid the overseas blind a little suspicious, but not enough to merit a full-fledged investigation. But to denounce you would only discredit the proceedings. You’re Helen Keller after all, nothing but a sweet, elderly, deaf-blind lady.

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Still, you think that at the very least some reporter should interview you about the whole sordid business. You wanted Polly to call someone, but she refused. Polly doesn’t have a political bone in her body, so the mere idea scares her. And anyway, if the journalists of your day think of you in political terms, they would only identify you as a Roosevelt Democrat, which would seem safe and neutral. So you sigh and go back to work. You have another dream while you are writing your book about Teacher. In the dream, you are a child again and you fall into the water. It seems to be water at the base of a waterfall, a very powerful one. Though you can swim, you feel your body being thrust down by the force of falling water and swirled around on a wicked current. But the current does not send you downstream away from the violently cascading water. Then, as the effort begins to feel too much for you, just at the moment when you feel you actually might be drowning, two strong hands close securely around your waist and lift you upward, breaking you free of the force of the water. At the first touch of the hands, you know it’s Teacher, and you give yourself over to the relief of knowing that she will save you. Then you find yourself in a panting heap on the ground. You still feel the vibration of the waterfall and a cool spray thrown up onto your face as you raise it to gasp at the air. When you reach out to touch her, you are startled to discover that her clothes and hands are warm and completely dry, while you are still sodden and dripping. Then, when you take hold of her hand to speak to her, you feel, and instantly understand, that for some reason she does not understand you. Her fingers are gentle but uncomprehending as you spell. So you try to say something out loud, but your mouth feels full of sand and your lungs feel weak from inhaling water. She pats you on the head as if you are a stranger or a stray dog and then starts to move away from you. “Teacher,” you say, or think because you have no way to communicate with her. “What are you doing? Where are you going?” You try to get up to follow her, but you are weighted to the spot by your wet clothes. When you wake from this dream, you wish you’d dreamed of fire. When the book is done, out of the house, with Nella bringing it to press, the dreams stop. Your skin clears up. Even your hair stops oppressing you. You think (to yourself? to Teacher?): “There. It’s done now.” But what is the end of the thought? Is it a challenge to her? “Go ahead. Burn down the house again. The book’s already done.” No, that’s not right. You don’t

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believe or even pretend to believe that she had anything to do with the house burning down. You know it is a book she didn’t want you to write. It is a book you didn’t want to write. But it is a book you had to write. So you wrote it. That’s all. Once it’s in print, someone makes a Braille copy for you. You feign pleasure to be polite. You’re still trying to rebuild your library and can think of a hundred other books you’d rather have, but the people who Braille for you do it on a volunteer basis, so you have to be gracious. You put it on the shelf with your other books. Then, in the middle of the night, you go into your study and pull it off your shelf. You don’t want it there, touching your other books. You try several other places in the bookcase, but you can’t find a place where you won’t touch it accidentally reaching for something else. So you take it outside and put it in the trash, glad that there is no longer anyone in the household who can read Braille, or who would bother to check for it or notice it missing. You stand there in the dark yard by the trash can, waiting and breathing hard. You shiver. It is a cold night, and you’re wearing only a robe and slippers. But you shiver with more than the cold. You wait. You realize that you have no idea what happens to the trash. Polly has taken over all the mundane concerns, and you’ve lost track. Now, you wonder, will someone come and cart it away? Will someone burn it? You would like to burn it yourself, except you don’t want to attract the attention. You wish it would spontaneously combust. You wait. Nothing. No one. The cold has sharpened your mind. You feel fully awake for the first time in more than fifteen years. So at last you allow yourself to accept that it’s certain that Teacher is never coming back. You realize that writing the book was a way to ensure it. Standing there, you inhale and exhale, feeling your warm body outlined by the cold air. Then your hand moves in the cold air, making one shape after another, slowly, deliberately, with a pause after each letter as if you expect them to turn to ice, or to stone. You say, “If you’re not coming back, then I’ll come to you.” January 31 But before I can think about your death, I need to think about your notion of death and the afterlife. I have read your book My Religion but have to admit I did not really get it, and not just because I am not myself

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a believer. For one thing, I’m not quite sure I understand how you became a follower of Swedenborg of all people. Part of me thinks it has more to do with the fact that someone went to the trouble of brailling his writing for you. This is always an issue for blind people. But all sorts of other religious texts would have been available. Once Braille became accepted, people were quick to transcribe religious material since the blind have always been assumed to have a tendency toward godlessness. But Swedenborg, Helen? To me, it all seems watered-down Christianity, and very New Age, with all those angels and spirits hovering around. Your book glosses over this aspect of Swedenborg’s belief, but you know it’s part of the doctrine. It seems true to your nature that you should read the bible as allegory and translate all the literal events and people into abstract ideas. This sort of translation process came easily to you. Experts, even those who usually denigrate blind consciousness as second-rate, concede nevertheless that we’re better able to deal with abstractions than sighted people because we don’t need to see to believe. I feel I have to leave the specifics of your belief aside, except for one thing. In the book, you say that you don’t know why anyone should be afraid of death. You understood death to mean reunion and reconciliation with departed loved ones. And as with anything you believed, you did not pay mere lip service to this. Not long after you finished Teacher, you broached the topic with Polly. You had begun to worry about Polly. Though she was five years your junior, she was nowhere near as healthy as you, physically or mentally. Her blood pressure was high and her heart was bad. One day you said, “When the time comes, and you feel that it’s really the end, I want you to do something for me. I want you to try to procure . . . tablets, pills, whatever it would be. Will you do that for me?” She said, “What? What are you talking about, Helen?” You sigh. You feel again, with a fresh pang, the loss of Teacher. Teacher would have understood this instantly. “Tablets,” you repeat, “pills, a drug of some kind. Something that will . . . I don’t think I want to live on after you.” Her hand jumps in yours. She makes an H, then starts an E, but can’t even get your whole name out. “What?” you say calmly. You are so tired of such squeamishness, such pretense. “What’s wrong with that?” After another minute of fumbling, she manages the words, “Helen, that would be . . .”

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“Suicide?” you say. “A sin?” Polly’s brother is a minister, and though you’ve never really discussed it, you know her religious beliefs are of a conventional, unthinking kind. You say, “Wouldn’t it be more of a sin to live on?” You force a laugh. “You know I would live on, for years probably. You know how healthy I am.” It’s true. You’ve hardly ever had so much as a head cold. Like any body that’s aging, yours has had its share of losses. You lost your eyes when you were around thirty, your teeth one by one over the years, your gall bladder when you were in your sixties, your hair and a piece of one of your toes in your seventies. You find it all sort of funny. You like to make jokes about how you’re falling apart. But Polly finds it grotesque and distressing. She’s in denial about her own mortality; she certainly does not want to discuss yours. “But Helen,” she says, then stops. This was a mistake. You should have known better. You’re trying hard to look calm, practical, matter-of-fact. You want to say, “I don’t know how useful I could be. Lectures are harder and harder. And the writing, well, I just don’t have that much more I want to say.” But you know she won’t get it. “Forget it, Polly,” you say instead. “Forget I mentioned it.” But of course she doesn’t. She reports it to the Trustees. She even considers writing to your sister and brother but then decides the Trustees can do that if they want. For a few weeks, everyone who comes over questions you about your mood. Are you depressed? They don’t say “suicidal,” but you know it’s what they mean. There’s even some discussion about taking you to a psychiatrist. But then they can’t figure out how you would communicate with a psychiatrist. Your speech has become comprehensible only to the people who are accustomed to it. If you brought someone along to interpret, it would violate confidentiality. Naturally, no one assumes you could ever find a psychiatrist willing to learn the finger alphabet. So nothing happens. You make an effort to appear cheerful at all times, and they figure it was just a passing phase. But I’m rushing. I’m collapsing the final thirty-two years of your life into nothingness. All your biographers do this. The idea that your life ended when Teacher died is so powerfully inscribed in the minds of people who know you that it becomes easy to ignore all that you did during that period. Your work changed after Teacher’s death. Your new freedom to travel made you more of a world figure, more of an international advocate for the disabled. You spent more time with other disabled people. True,

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you and Teacher did fund-raising for the blind, but it was not until after her death that you started spending time with the blind, and with other disabled people. In addition to the fund-raising speeches and meetings with civic leaders, you made a point to visit children in schools and adults in rehabilitation institutions and sheltered workshops. This could have been a mere public relations ploy. But I sense your visits made a difference. I like to imagine you in a hospital, visiting those wounded soldiers. I imagine you in a tailored navy blue dress with white polka dots on it, and a rather exuberant flowered hat (you always went in for lavish hats). You move briskly through the ward on Polly’s arm. You display your best beauty-pageant smile. You stop to shake a hand here, pat a shoulder there. Flashbulbs pop. A newsreel camera whirs. You stop at the bed of a nineteen-year-old blind boy who is struggling with Braille. You actually sit down next to him, playfully shoving him with your hip to make room. You touch the back of his hand as he drags it across the line. Then you make an exaggerated scowl, shake your head, and “Tsk tsk” loudly. Then you lift his heavy hand off the page. “Re-lax!” you say out loud, and you shake his arm vigorously by the wrist. You shake him so hard his whole thin body wobbles. He’s at risk of falling out of bed. Being handled in this way by a stranger whom he’d been primed to expect would be more dignified makes the boy laugh nervously, but then he hears the laughter of his buddies joining in and laughs in earnest. Then you show him how it’s done. You let his hand ride piggyback on yours as it glides effortlessly across the line. You touch the very tips of his fingers and say, “Duh tip ith motht zenzitive.” Polly, standing behind you by the wall, repeats your words, but no one in the room needs to listen to her. The boy tries again. He reads the line out loud. You touch his face to read his lips. You nod your head, your whole upper body, in exaggerated affirmation. You throw an arm around his shoulders and plant a noisy kiss on his cheek. You raise your hands above your head and clap. The other boys join in, and those who can, stamp and whistle. You smile all around. The harsh overhead lights make your glass eyes twinkle brightly. You are a cross between a precocious seven-year-old and a manic grandmother. They are drawn to you. They gather around you, closing ranks. Some wheel forward, others clump forward on crutches and

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braces. Those who cannot move swivel eyes and ears in your direction, eager for more. “Duh tip,” you say again, then guide the boy’s fingertips swiftly down the page line after line. “See?” you say. Then you stop, drop his hand, and slap your forehead with the heel of your own. “Tsorree. I fowgot,” you say. You jab an elbow into the boy’s ribs and guffaw raucously. The other boys join in, whoop and stomp. They all understand that you are spoofing the infantilizing patronage of some of the people who are supposed to be training them. They find it intoxicatingly subversive. There’s another blind boy. He’s had an operation on one of his eyes and wears a black patch. Running your hands over his face, you discover this and exclaim, “Oooh, a piwate!” They all giggle. You demonstrate how to maneuver through space guided by a sighted person. You play the sighted person. You march him at breakneck speed down the aisle between the beds, repeating “Left wight, left wight.” At the end, you whirl him around so he slams into a cart of food trays. When you make him bend to retrieve them, the large pocketbook in the crook of your arm swings forward and smacks him on the side of his head so he reels sideways and overturns a chair. With each slapstick mishap, you make exaggerated sympathetic gestures and noises. “Whadda mess! Maybe yoo shud stay home,” you tell him, patting his shoulder. Another boy pounds the arms of his wheelchair and hollers, “Yeah, watch where you’re going, fella!” Too soon, you are gone. You leave behind a sense of wonder, because you were not at all what they expected. And what you told them was not quite the message they’re getting from everyone else. You tell them that disability has very little to do with the nobler emotions—courage, fortitude, pluck—and more to do with the practical matter of finding a way to live in a world not designed for them. You caught them at a crucial moment in their lives as disabled people, before the dreaded martyr phase sets in. They are all still in that weird limbo state of wonder when they discover themselves to be themselves despite the fact that part of them is missing or no longer functions as it did. Unfortunately, many of them will now enter the martyr phase never to return. This is not to say you have to be among the war wounded to go through the martyr phase. We all go through it, even those of us who have been disabled since childhood or birth. Though maybe the phrase “go through” isn’t quite accurate; better to say it’s a perennial option. It’s hard

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to avoid, even tempting, because the Normals are so generous with their praise: “Oh, you’re so courageous, so inspirational! If it was me, I’d just give up.” It’s easy to get sucked in and hard to notice that all the while they’re praising you, they’re not really doing much to help. Praise does not install ramps or hire readers, and a martyr accepts his lot without asking for these things. Disabled veterans are particularly at risk for the condition because there’s the patriotic element and the fact that they, in effect, volunteered to become disabled. The people around them—friends, family, community at large—cannot look at them without sighing over the tragic sacrifice of their life. But a few of them, perhaps one of the blind boys, and one or two others, will retain something else from your visit, something that will allow them to say, “My life was not sacrificed. True, I can’t see, hear, walk, whatever, but I am still living.” I wish you could have done more of this, Helen. You were on to something. February 13 A graduate student came to talk to me yesterday. He’s not my student, but he comes by from time to time to talk. He is in a wheelchair, so we tend to talk about disability stuff. You’ll be glad to know that nowadays, disabled people have given up arguing about who’s more disabled than whom. We recognize that each person’s impairment comes with a set of problems involving how we move through space, communicate, access information, or whatever. The problems are different, the solutions are different, but it’s pointless to try to calibrate which is worse. Apparently nondisabled people still debate this, but we do not. We figured out how divisive such debates can be. So anyway, this student was not trying to convince me that it is worse to be in a wheelchair than to be blind. He was having a bad day. It snowed over the weekend. They plowed the streets around campus, but the plowed snow was blocking the curb cut where the handivan wanted to deposit him. Fortunately for the student, there were some brawny guys walking by who helped carry him and the chair to more-or-less clean pavement. This was helpful, of course, but also humiliating. Then, once he got to this building, he discovered that his usual elevator was out of service, which meant he had to go all the way through the building to the elevator at the other end.

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This involves maneuvering through a number of doors, none of which are automatic, and some narrow hallways full of students coming and going. On top of this, he’s been having a fight with the library because he can’t get his chair up into the stacks. The library argues that they are not in violation of ADA because they will happily send someone up there to bring him any book he wants. He argues that this is not the same thing as being able to go up there on his own to scan the shelves for himself. The Office for Disability Services is not helpful. They consider this student uppity and troublesome because he is always ready to speak up when things go wrong. He thinks they’re mad at him for refusing to participate in a wheelchair race during Disability Awareness Week, and because he organized a protest of the president’s office about the university’s contract with sign language interpreters. There were also some other issues on his mind to do with students in a class he’s teaching, his personal care assistant quitting, and his parents, but I think you get the picture. So he came to vent to me, and I listened. I have to admit I was not quite in the mood. He wanted me to write a letter to the Office for Disability Services. I agreed reluctantly, not because I don’t think he has a legitimate gripe, but because I have my own problems with those people, though my dealings with them have been limited. They don’t consider it their “mission” to provide services to disabled faculty, which means that during all their extensive training (it takes a lot of training to deal with disabled people), it never occurred to anyone to imagine a faculty member with a disability. Their condescension quickly turns to nastiness, so I avoid them as much as I can. But here’s my real confession. My first response to his library problem was, “What do you expect? They’re not going to rebuild the whole library just for you.” It’s a generational thing, Helen. I mean, when I was in school, there was no federal mandate about access, no Office for Disability Services. Most of what I needed in the way of accommodations, I could get only by hook or by crook, and pay for myself. Whenever I had to talk about it to someone in authority, a professor or academic counselor, it was always a highly charged and uncomfortable business. I always felt I had to frame it clearly as necessary information, not as a complaint or an excuse. And I certainly never raised the issue unless the other person absolutely needed to know about it. On some level, I always felt that if I talked about my disability in any other way, it would invite the response, “Well if it’s so

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hard for you, maybe you should drop the class, drop out, stay home.” But this guy has no such qualms. He spent the afternoon wheeling himself into every office on the floor. And he seemed to expect that everyone, disabled and nondisabled alike, would share his outrage and want to help. So that was yesterday. Then, last night, I had a dream about you, Helen. A nightmare, really, though the effect was more infuriating than frightening. In the dream, I went to a museum where they had an exhibition of photographs of you. I had a sense of what these photographs were like. I say “sense” because it was more general than actual, as if I’d heard or read some description of them and formed a mental impression. They were all in color, apparently, which may be why I wanted to see them, since as I’ve told you, I can perceive color. My impression was that they must have that lurid intensity of early Technicolor; colors not found in nature, or only in very rare nature—peacock hues, gem colors. I imagined you at sunset, posed on a high ledge of the Chrysler building, framed by a beautiful art deco arch. I imagined you in an iridescent evening gown doing the jitterbug with a GI. This was what I anticipated would be on display. When I showed up at the ticket counter, they told me that blind people were not allowed in. “We have no audio description, no Braille labels,” they said. I said that I could bring a sighted person with me to read the labels and describe the images. I said that this way, they would sell two tickets instead of one. They said that they expected a large crowd, that space was limited, and so my companion and I would clog up the flow of visitors. What was most realistic about this dream was the attitude of the people at the museum. They were more perplexed than hostile. They were mystified by my protest, as if their exclusion of me was so natural even I should accept it. Sure it was unfair. Life is unfair. Blindness is unfair: They were not responsible. In real life I accept this. I cannot see photographs. I cannot drive a car. I work around it. But part of me rebels about some things. For instance, the other day I was at a lecture. The speaker was using slides to illustrate some point about the work of a novelist. At first, the speaker was pretty good about verbally indicating what aspects of the image were relevant to his argument. He said, “Notice where the figure’s hand is,” or, “The choice of blue for the figure’s robe is quite significant.” So I understood what was important. But after the first few images, he stopped describing and just

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showed the images one after the other. What I mean is, I know how much the visual matters to the sighted. A person only has to spend twenty minutes in their world to know this. I know a picture’s worth a thousand words, but in the context of a literary discussion, I felt like more of an effort should be made to find the words. Contrary to what they may believe, I do not long to be sighted again. I accept my blindness and don’t spend a lot of time hoping for a cure. I honestly don’t know what I would do with sight if I got it back. I only wish that the thought occurred to them once in a while that someone in the audience, someone reading or listening, might be blind. That’s all. I assume the dream comes from you, Helen. And the message I derive from it is that my response to the grad student yesterday was no better than the response of the people in the dream. Why shouldn’t a blind person visit an art gallery? And why shouldn’t they rebuild the library for the grad student in the wheelchair? Certainly, if they were to build a new library, they would have to design it with him in mind, and with me, too. Also, in my dream, you seem to be telling me that it’s all right to complain, to get mad, to stage a fuss. The squeaky wheel gets the oil? Or, more accurately, rattle the bars of the cage loud enough, and they’ll let you out just to shut you up. This is not like you, Helen, but I like it. March 8 I’m reminded of something that happened last summer on a brief trip to Cape Cod. One day at the beach, there was a woman with part of one leg missing. She was youngish, about thirty, Nick told me. She waded into the water using a walker. When she was in over her waist, a man she was with, maybe her husband, took the walker from her, and she swam around by herself for a while. When she was done swimming, the man brought the walker back to her and helped her to stand. She made her way back up the beach and strapped on a prosthesis. Then she and the man gathered up their stuff, walked away and left. As you can imagine, she created quite a stir, but a stir of a guarded and hushed variety. Apparently, it was hard to tell whether the woman had been born that way or lost her leg more recently. The people around us speculated about it with pity and awe, or whatever exactly it is nondisabled people

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evince when they’re obliged to consider life with a disability. Horror, disgust, fear—I don’t know what it is. It’s complicated. But for me, and I’m sure for you, it seemed like progress. An amputee at the beach, and a female no less. Which is not to say that the world has evolved sufficiently that such an event could pass unnoticed. I sensed that everyone at the beach was staring at her. But maybe next year, they’ll stare less. There’s more than one way to be a human being—that’s what you told the world. On the surface, it seems a pretty innocuous statement, but in fact, it’s quite revolutionary. It forces people to question everything they take for granted as normal. It’s a message that needs to be spoken still. It’s what we all go on saying after you. We say it by forcing our way into their notice, into their world. I worry about a lot of them so much, the Normals I know. If some of them ever become disabled (and some of them will just as a process of aging), it will be a bad business. If they could just let go of the fear, I think. I have the fear, too. I’m afraid of losing my hearing. But I know that if or when it happens, I’ll make do somehow. Making do is not such a foreign concept to me. For the Normals, making do is dreadful even to contemplate. What would life be without a leg, without eyesight, without hearing, they worry. Life would be life, you and I say. Flawed, limited in some ways, rich and various in others. I don’t enjoy feeling like we exist to offer illuminating insights to the Normals. But in my more generous moments (few and far between as they are), I feel it’s something worth doing. They need a lot of help. March 22 Speaking of progress . . . Last night I had the television on at the end of Jeopardy!. Do you know about Jeopardy!? It’s a quiz show where contestants are given an answer and then must supply the question. I turned it on at the end of the show, the Final Jeopardy Round, when the contestants get to wager all their winnings on one final question. The category was Famous Women, and the answer was this: “The 1904 graduate of Radcliffe College who went on to be a suffragist, a lecturer, a vaudeville performer, and a writer.” The winning question was you, Helen. “Who was Helen Keller?”

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I thought you would like to know that for once, you were remembered for things you did and not simply for the fact that you were deaf and blind. It’s progress of a sort. “Progress?” you say. “You call that progress?” Don’t be so picky, Helen. Sometimes you have to take what you can get. April 18 A student asked me today what I thought your life would be like if you were living now. I thought it was a good question, so much better than the usual question about what your life would have been like if you hadn’t been deaf and blind. You, today? Naturally, I thought about technology. In my imagination, I seat you at a computer with a Braille interface, a scanner, high-speed Internet connections, a printer, and a Braille embosser. You would have independent access to limitless resources, be able to communicate without anyone’s aid or intervention with people and institutions all over the world. Think how much writing you could get done. Think how easy it would be to do research, to keep up with current events. Think how easily you could take care of your daily correspondence. You could get yourself a laptop computer with synthetic voice output and type your side of every conversation. You could take it everywhere as an automatic interpreter. Would you be married or have a “live-in someone?” Sorry to say, the odds are against it. Statistics show that the overwhelming majority of disabled women today live alone. Disabled men do somewhat better. I am a freakish exception in this. Would you be a freakish exception too? As convivial as you are, it’s hard for me to imagine you without someone in your life. So maybe you could beat the odds. But if you had someone, it’s certain that person’s life’s work would not be the care and maintenance of you. I should point out that disabled people today have a lot of ambivalence about technology. Many of us are reluctant to be too dependent—the power goes out, batteries run down, things get wet or fall on the floor. When you depend on something and it breaks, you find yourself truly helpless. Also, there’s a problem of perception, the fear that our reliance on machinery makes us seem less fully human, part machine. Others argue that there is a similar problem when we rely too much on other people. We learned

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this from the example of your life, Helen. People worry that the assistant or teacher or spouse or guide dog will be perceived to be the one truly in charge. If you were alive today, you’d have to weigh in on all these questions. The other problem with all this technology is economic. Being disabled is still expensive, Helen. It’s possible that state and federal agencies would supply you with some of this equipment, but they might insist that your employer pay for it. I would like to think that you could be self-employed, the freelance writer you wanted to be but couldn’t in your actual life. But the state agencies might balk at this, consider it unviable. You might be able to get a job as a staff writer on a newspaper or magazine, writing features, maybe book reviews, an opinion column of some sort. What sort of topics would they want you to address? Would they give you free reign or would they limit you to issues related to your disabilities, or the general topic of health? Like a lot of writers, you might seek steady work in academia. This might work for you since you had such an intellectual bent. Universities are supposed to be havens of advanced ideas and tolerance. Would people today accept a deaf-blind professor? Not quite. They have a hard enough time with those of us who are only one or the other. Anyway, I think your political interest would make you want a broader forum. You could work for an organization like the AFB as you did in life, but you would be the person in charge rather than the celebrity on the stump passing the hat. You might get appointed to one of several federal commissions or agencies on disability issues in education, housing, or employment. This would be less of a token gesture than it might have been a generation ago. You would not have to settle for a mere “crip job”—a job created for the sole purpose of giving employment to a disabled person. You would actually have some power and some specific tasks to accomplish. I like to imagine you as a member of the “access police,” checking to ensure that business and public facilities comply with regulations. I picture you staging surprise raids, showing up unannounced to measure doorways, examine Braille menus. You would write up citations, typing furiously into your voice output laptop to make it say, “And you better ramp these steps, Mister. Or we’re gonna shut you down.” If you were alive today, you would have to be less lovable, Helen. These messages are still not welcome. Too many of the Normals still wonder why

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we don’t all just stay at home. So if you’re planning to come back, I’d wait a few more decades. May 4 Here’s a dream I would like to have. It is dawn. You are moving over water. I don’t mean that you are walking on the water—not that. But you are skimming along its surface on some sort of motorized raft. It’s a dream, so the logistics are unimportant. You are dressed in the ceremonial costume of your people, which means? It’s hard to describe. It’s as if you’re wreathed in a glowing mist. It shifts its form and color around your body as you move toward shore. On shore, there is a crowd of people. They cheer, or else they watch your approach with an awed silence. A few shed silent tears of joy. When you are near enough so they can see the light sparkling on your eyes, you raise your right hand slowly, magnificently, in the universal gesture that means, “I come in peace.” I am with you on the raft. I am with a small band of others—your followers. We are a pretty sorry lot. We whine and complain, grumble and bicker amongst ourselves. One says, “Do you know what saltwater does to a wheelchair?” and another, “Hey, down in front! You’re standing in front of the interpreter.” You deserve better, but you have your back to us and pretend we are more dignified than we are. You still have your right arm raised, palm to the crowd on shore. You are smiling, resplendent. Behind your back, your free hand signs to us. Those of us who can see communicate your words to the rest. “Smile,” you tell us. “And wave your hand like this. Note that my gesture of peace also allows me to fend off a net or a blow.” No? Not the way you thought about it? Maybe not. But be that as it may, now that I’ve contemplated your legacy, your afterlife, I feel ready to imagine your final day. June 1, 1968 The hands that wake you belong to Evelyn Seide. You recognize this instantly from her long nails, slick with polish. So the first thing you think is, “Only Evelyn. So I’m still here.”

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Evelyn is spelling into your hand. You do not pay attention to her words. You know she’s only saying some version of “Rise and shine. Wake up, sleepyhead.” You smile at her. You like Evelyn Seide. She used to work for the AFB; she probably still draws her salary from them. But she used to work in the office; now she is one of your full-time caretakers. She and her husband live in the apartment over your garage. Some of the Trustees think she is unsuitable for the job, too brash and vulgar. Polly despised her, calling her “that little tramp.” But you like her. The heady cocktail of her many scents—hairspray, cosmetics, perfume, cigarettes—often makes you tear up or sneeze, but it also makes her very vivid to you. Your favorite memory of Evelyn is that time she took you to the doctor for your annual checkup when you turned eighty. It was a new doctor, quite young and very officious. Though there was nothing really wrong with you, he felt it was his duty to offer some medical advice and so told you that you should cut out alcohol. You have never drunk a lot. You only have an occasional cocktail before dinner and could easily give it up, but you sensed he said this only to assert his authority over you. So you pulled yourself up to your full height and spelled very slowly to Evelyn, knowing that she has enough spunk to deliver the line correctly, “Young man, I am eighty years old. If I choose to have a martini every now and again, I will have a martini!” The two of you laughed about it all the way home on the train. Evelyn enjoyed retelling the story, making much of the doctor’s stupefied reaction. Evelyn has a healthy disrespect for authority, which is why the Trustees don’t like her. And why you do. Evelyn’s husband makes a very good martini. Also, Manhattans, which you prefer in the wintertime. It is springtime now. June 1st. For some reason, you remember the date without having to ask. You like the first of every month. And this is your birth month. You still get that childlike excitement about your birthday. Evelyn has you standing now. She supports your elbow as you shuffle toward the bathroom. You feel lighter today. Your joints are looser. You are frail now, thinner than you were, your spine slightly bent. Occasionally you have dizzy spells when you get out of bed, so they worry about you falling and breaking something. But apart from your general frailty, there’s nothing really wrong with you. There are those in your entourage who believe you have had a series of minor strokes over the last several years. None

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of them did much damage. They were merely temporary power outages that severed some circuits and rewired others. Have you lost any of your marbles? I think you have simply gathered your marbles and receded into yourself. You are not as responsive and communicative as you always were before. You’ve always found it easy to be distracted by your memories. Now the past is simply more vivid and interesting than anything in the present. Also, when you go back, reliving certain moments, you discover there was a lot you didn’t observe at the time, a lot you didn’t notice, not to mention a lot you didn’t understand. It almost makes you ashamed how oblivious you used to be. Maybe that’s what keeps you going, keeps you here, all that life to relive. You think this must be normal for someone as old as you. You will be eighty-eight on the 27th. It’s much older than you ever expected to be. Neither of your parents lasted this long. How did it happen, you wonder. You’re almost ashamed of yourself. There are a lot of people exerting a lot of effort keeping you going. You think all the energy could be better employed. At the bathroom door you halt, turn to Evelyn, and say aloud, “Ahm aw wight.” Evelyn’s hand hesitates, at first because it takes her a second to understand you and then because she is weighing whether or not she should leave you alone. “It’s OK,” you spell to her, making the letters firmly. After another half minute, she spells back, “OK.” In the bathroom you empty your bladder, wash your hands and face, brush your teeth. You’re pretty sure you had a bath before bed. When you come out, you find Evelyn emerging from the closet. You feel her pause to look at you. Perhaps she notices that you are feeling lighter and brighter than you have for some days now. She has a couple of hangers in her hand. With her other hand, she lifts your hand to her lips and tells you, “It’s warm today.” You nod your head very slowly and deliberately, so that your whole body bobs up and down. “Wahm,” you repeat and smile. “Warm” was one of the first words you ever learned to speak out loud. You could tell Evelyn this but know it will only confuse her. “Yes, warm,” her lips say against your fingers. “Warm. Spring.” “Spwing,” you repeat out loud, smiling and nodding. These baby-talk conversations bother you sometimes. You worry that Evelyn will think

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you’re talking down to her. It’s not that you think Evelyn is stupid. In fact, you know she has a keen native intelligence. But you know that she has trouble communicating with you first thing in the morning. It takes her a few hours before her fingers warm to the task. Your hand drifts to the hangers she’s holding and identifies each dress from the first touch. You choose a short-sleeved cotton dress. It is white, you know, with a pattern of leaves and ivy in green. “Ivy green,” you think, and smile almost to the point of laughing. Is that why you bought it? You remember you bought it for a special occasion, some public appearance years ago now, but can’t remember what occasion it was. Now you no longer appear in public. The dress is old, but you’ve probably only ever worn it two or three times. You lay the dress over the back of a chair and shuffle to the dresser for your underwear. You consider going out onto the balcony to feel the temperature for yourself, but this seems like a long trip, and it would be frivolous to ask Evelyn to escort you on such an errand. You are aware that she is making your bed. So you slip out of your nightgown and into your clothes. You seat yourself at the dressing table to arrange your hair, though there’s not much to arrange anymore. Polly used to make you wear a wig, even around the house. You hated it. It was itchy, and you were always worried it would fall off. You’re glad you no longer have to put up with such foolishness. Your hair now is as fine and silky as a baby’s, as feathery and white as strands of cirrus clouds. You comb it together carefully; gathering up all the stray wisps; you twist the thin strand into a small knot and pin it with a single half-size hairpin. There was a woman here a week or more ago. Who was it? Someone’s daughter, wasn’t it? The daughter of someone you used to know, or met once. You can’t remember. Even when she came, you were unsure who she was and how she knew you. All sorts of people just show up. It was a bad day, and you were in bed. She came upstairs and then, for some reason, sat down on the bed and unpinned her long hair so you could run your hands through it. Why would anyone do such a thing? you wonder. Did it really happen? You retain a memory of her hair in your fingers. She left one of her hairpins behind. It’s one of the fancy ornamental kind. You have it there on your dressing table. You pick it up and finger it. So it must have really happened—such a strange thing to do.

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Evelyn stands behind you with her hands on your shoulders. You hold the hairpin up, preparing to ask her about the event, but you’re not even sure how to begin. Fortunately, she is not looking at you but at her own reflection in the mirror, appraising the new shade of lipstick she’s wearing. So you return the hairpin to the glass tray where you found it. The clink it makes causes Evelyn to drop her gaze to look at you. You feel her give an involuntary start as she does this. Your pale dress, your snowy hair, the pallor of your complexion, which comes from being indoors all the time, makes you look strikingly ethereal, nearly translucent. Then she smiles, leans over you and spells into your hand, “Pretty.” “Dank yoo,” you say out loud. She lifts your hand to her face and says into it, “Ready for breakfast?” She says this much louder than she needs to. You can read a whisper as well as a shout. But it is her way. You squeeze her hand and repeat your nodding bob. Then she helps you to your feet, guides you carefully down the stairs. You are struck again by how strange your house seems—not alien exactly, but anonymous. For one thing, nothing smells familiar. You’re not sure why this should be. Also, when you brush against the grandfather clock at the bottom of the stairs or trail your hand along the back of the sofa, neither piece feels like something you would own. You believe these things came into your life too late for you to form any attachment to them. Most of the furniture you lost in the fire had been with you since your student days, or else had a specific memory related to how you came to own it. After the fire, it was Polly who selected all the new things. They were all brand new, all matching. It’s like living in a hotel. You like hotels; it’s one of the things you always liked about travel—the daily challenge of new environments to explore. But you’ve learned to refrain from commenting on how strange and disorienting everything seems to you because the stuff has been here for twenty years already, so any remark leads people to worry about your memory. You believe it’s for the best that you feel so little connection with the objects around you. It will make it easier to leave it all behind. Evelyn leads you into the kitchen and seats you at the table and serves you breakfast: a boiled egg, whole wheat toast, orange juice, stewed prunes, and coffee. It has not escaped your notice that no one ever consults you about the menu anymore. Not that you would ask for anything else, necessarily. In fact, the trend started with Polly, especially in the last decade

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or so of her life. She became very fussy and officious about your diet, disparaging all sorts of foods as unhealthy or, more often, unsuitable. It went along with her obsession about your appearance. She never let you leave the house unless you were dressed for tea at the Plaza, or so it seemed to you. You knew it had to do with her insecurities, her feeling that many of your friends had always considered her an unworthy companion. After all, she had only a high school education, no particular political or philosophical beliefs. So she made the most of her caretaking duties, making sure that no one could fault her for how you looked or ate. But now it is the Trustees who decide. They actually consulted nutrition experts. Evelyn and Winifred Corbally, your other caretaker, have a complete set of daily menu plans they are careful to follow to the letter. Breakfast is comparatively easy; at least there’s nothing to weigh or measure. Sometimes you feel like a science experiment, a lab animal. You suspect someone is keeping track and will publish the findings. But you eat what’s put before you, as you always have. You think now that you have lost a lot of your sense of taste. Nothing seems to have much savor anymore. But you chew, sip, and swallow automatically, out of politeness to Evelyn as much as anything else. You would be content with just the toast and coffee. You wish you could communicate this to someone. You wish you could tell someone that if they didn’t make such a fuss of feeding you so well you might fade away quicker, but you haven’t figured out how to phrase the comment so it does not sound self-dramatizing. Evelyn pours herself a cup of coffee and joins you at the table. You catch a whiff of the Times as she unfolds and shakes it out. “Let’s see,” she says aloud, clearing her throat. Her eyes scan the front page, then she reaches for your hand and begins to read you the headlines. Evelyn’s fingerspelling improves when she is reading. May 1968 has been a memorable time in many parts of the world. Today there’s a lot of news about the situation in France. It seems so incredible to you—student riots, mass labor action, the possible downfall of the government. Can it really be happening? And in France of all places. You have found the ’60s in many ways a very positive and exciting period—the civil rights movement, the anti-war protests. You’ve even learned that there’s a new women’s movement. You wonder if anyone’s been reading your early feminist writings. There have been tragedies as well—the war, the assassinations. You met President Kennedy once and found him quite appealing. You are moved

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by his brother’s desire to follow in his footsteps. You wished you had been more a part of things, wished that at least you had written a letter to the editor, signed a petition, or something. But you caution yourself against taking too much interest in the things of this world. You think that surely it must be time to leave it all behind. You know you won’t get much more than the headlines from Evelyn. Polly would read you the whole story, but she rationed the news, using it as a reward to get you to do something you didn’t want to. If you typed so many letters, practiced a speech for so many minutes, then she would read to you for half an hour. Teacher used to scan the whole paper, looking for the items she knew would most interest you. Then she would read you a couple of paragraphs from each story, compiling a sort of personalized news digest just for you. The back door opens to admit Winnie Corbally. You feel the breeze through the door and Evelyn turning to say hello. You like Winnie also. She is warmer and more maternal than Evelyn. She is a trained nurse who first came to you almost ten years ago to help care for Polly at the end. Then she stayed on and now divides the caretaking duties with Evelyn. She hangs her cardigan on a hook in the utility closet by the back door while she and Evelyn exchange pleasantries. When she comes out of the closet, she stops abruptly and stares at you. Evelyn observes her look and says, “Yes, I know.” Winnie continues to stare at you, taking in your whole appearance. “It must be the dress.” “Or the weather,” Evelyn says, glancing longingly at the door. “It’s a lovely morning.” Winnie approaches. You inhale her scent, a combination of Ivory soap and cinnamon mouthwash. She leans over and spells into your hand, “You look very good today.” You smile and nod. With your free hand, you pat her face all over in a mockery of your face-tracing routine. “Yoo too,” you say out loud. The three of you laugh. Winnie shrugs and says, “Well, maybe she slept well, too.” You have your good days and your bad days. Some days, they look at you and it seems certain that the end is near, but then on other days, days like today, you look like you could go on forever. You have no control over this. You are not even aware of feeling better on some days than on others. A few weeks ago, you had a mild head cold, or maybe it was the flu. Since

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Evelyn and Winnie are so alert to every change in you, they noticed your runny nose even before you did. Their constant vigilance kept it from turning into anything more serious. If you were a normal eighty-seven-year-old woman living alone or even in a normal nursing home, the outcome might have been different. Then the two of them have their weekly discussion of the logistics of your care. It is Saturday, one of the days when they are both around. Together they list the tasks that need to be done and decide which of them will do them. You know this is going on and so sit patiently, munching the last of your toast. All this attention embarrasses you, but you know it’s their job, so you make no objection. They watch you, waiting for the inevitable and dreading it at the same time, afraid they’ll be blamed after the fact. It’s unfair, you know. Surely no one truly believes you can live forever, no matter how careful they are. You notice all this more acutely because you have no one to take care of now, and after all those years caring for others, you know what’s going on in their minds. All those years looking after Teacher, and then Polly was such a handful for her last decade or so. Now there’s no one. You wish you could have a pet. The Trustees have banned dogs, fearing that a big dog would knock you over and that you would trip over a small one. There hasn’t been a dog in the house for almost twenty years, when before you always had dogs. You have never been partial to cats, but now you think you could warm up to one. Maybe they would let you have a bird, a canary or parakeet. That would be all right. You could feed it and clean its cage, and let it fly around your room and light on your finger. Way back when you were a girl, Teacher once got a couple of doves and let them loose in your room so you would understand about flight. You can still feel the thrill of the feathery breeze they flapped up as they blundered about the contained space in their crazy circles. And you remember the breeze thrown up by Teacher’s skirt as she whirled around and around, waving her arms to make them fly. Teacher was just a big kid herself then. Once in the house in Forest Hills, a sparrow flew through the open window into your study. That was in the late ’20s. You were there with a blind friend, someone you’d known as a girl—what was her name again? There was no one else at home. You chased the dog out of the room and shut the door. Your friend could hear where the bird was, but it was you who sensed the trajectory of its flight and threw a scarf over it and picked it up to return

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it to the open air. Your hands still recall the astonishing smallness of its light-boned body and the rapid pulsations of its frightened heart. Evelyn and Winnie stare at you. Your large hands are cupped as if around some small, fragile object. Slowly you raise your hands to your face and rest your lips against your knuckles. “What now?” Evelyn says, but with no irritation. Winnie shrugs and shakes her head slowly. “Well, I guess it’s not something we need to know about,” Evelyn says, pushing back in her chair to rise. Then she helps you up, and together you go off to your study to deal with the mail. You still get an astounding amount of mail considering how long it’s been since you’ve made any sort of public appearance or published anything. There are many people in the world who will hear the news of your death tomorrow and say, “I thought she was dead already.” But apparently there are still many who know you are alive and are eager to communicate with you. This is where Evelyn truly shines. She scans and sorts each letter into its appropriate category. Mostly there are requests for money. There have always been many people under the delusion that you have a lot of ready cash at your disposal. She sorts these into two piles to forward to national and international agencies. Then there are a number of requests for personal tokens from you: photographs, autographs, and the like. Many of these come from school children who are writing term papers about you. Then there are a fair number of letters from people and agencies asking for your support for some program or issue. Will you please add your name to this list, send a letter to this address . . . ? Evelyn’s had cards printed with boilerplate responses to the most common requests. This is something Teacher and Polly never would have allowed. Polly in particular would have been appalled. She was so fearful, especially in the later years, that people would be critical of her clerical skills. So she had you personally answer every piece of mail that came in. And even you resisted Evelyn’s innovations at first. But you are eightyseven years old, almost eighty-eight. You have written at least a dozen letters every day of your life since you were ten, frequently many more than that. That means between three hundred and four hundred thousand letters composed, written or typed, sealed, and sent by you. Surely that’s enough for one lifetime.

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Evelyn puts you to work signing your name to things, then stuffing, sealing, and stamping envelopes, while she types letters to the few requests that require a more complicated response. She has compiled a list of phrases culled from your writing and speeches. She reads the results to you, and you smile and nod. “Soundz jus like me,” you say. The routines of your daily life have not changed much since the Wrentham years, only the cast of characters. You find yourself thinking about Nella Henney. Though her excessive reverence toward you made it hard to think of her as a true friend, you were very fond of her for many years. At one time, the idea was proposed that she should be the one to take over when Polly was gone, but there was her husband Keith to consider, so the idea never got far. Then Polly got wind of the plan and became resentful, then hostile. There was some unpleasantness about the royalties to The Miracle Worker. And then there was more trouble to do with her wanting power of attorney. This all went on in the last few years of Polly’s life, when she was more and more suspicious of everyone. Recalling this, you think you may have caught some of her paranoia, or else it was just simpler to go along with it. Secretly, you were always troubled by the knowledge that Nella kept a journal about you, writing down details of every conversation and meeting. Probably she planned to write a book. It made you very self-conscious whenever she was around. You stopped seeing her even before Polly died. Now you miss her visits. As much as you like Evelyn and Winnie, they are not intellectual companions. You cannot discuss your reading or world events with them. And they never knew Teacher, so a huge part of your life—a part of who you are—is unavailable to them. Every now and then, you think perhaps you should drop Nella a line, a word or two of greeting, but somehow you never get around to it. Before you know, it’s lunchtime. You and Evelyn make your way back to the kitchen, looking for Winnie. But there has been a delay. There was a problem with the garbage disposal requiring a visit from the plumber, which means Winnie has only now returned from doing the week’s grocery shopping. While they discuss all this, you stand in the kitchen doorway and remember Polly’s stroke. Do you want to remember this, Helen? You shrug to yourself. It’s not a problem, you think. You have worse memories. It was sometime in the late ’50s. You and Polly were in your study rehearsing a speech, and then you came into the kitchen for lunch. You were dis-

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tracted by the speech, so you didn’t notice at first that Polly was behaving very strangely. She lit one of the burners on the stove but put nothing on it. You smelled the gas, felt the small puff of the ignition, but as you moved closer to the stove, you found no pot or pan heating there. Polly was standing at the refrigerator with the door open. You turned off the burner and went to stand near her. She brushed your inquiring hand aside and went back to relight the burner. But this time, she took out a small saucepan and placed it on the flame. “Soup,” you thought, though you hadn’t discussed what you wanted for lunch. But again Polly walked away without putting anything in the pan. You removed the empty pan from the flame and reached into the cupboard where the canned goods were kept. Since you never cook anything alone, there were no Braille labels on the cans. Still, you could tell the canned soup from the canned tomatoes. And Polly tended to buy only a limited number of kinds—chicken noodle, tomato, cream of mushroom. You chose a can at random, found the can opener in the drawer, and opened the can. Chicken noodle, you smelled, and were about to announce it out loud when you felt a sudden concussion under foot. Polly had dropped something. No, Polly had knocked over one of the chairs. You put down the can and can opener, extinguished the burner, hurried to her side, and righted the chair. But when you touched her, you were alarmed to find she was trembling all over. Polly’s nerves had been bad for years, since the fire, as your theory timed it. There had been a good deal of concern about her blood pressure. The two of you had been working very hard for several weeks preparing this new speech, and Polly never had your stamina. “Here,” you said soothingly, “sit down here. I’ll make lunch—chicken noodle soup, and we could have some of that cheese . . .” But she wouldn’t sit. She wanted to go outside for fresh air. So you helped her to the door and guided her carefully down the back steps onto the stone patio. It was winter, cold but dry. Neither of you had a coat. Still, after a minute, Polly was breathing easier. You felt her lips and discovered she was speaking, saying something about having lunch outside. You took her hand firmly and said, “Polly, it’s not even forty degrees out here.” But then your hand on her mouth felt her say the strangest thing of all, so strange it jarred you out of your present concerns into a weird limbo of suspended animation. “John,” she said.

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She said it quite distinctly, and in a way that felt surprised to you, as if she’d just caught a fleeting glance of him and was calling him back. There was no one in your present circle named John, and try as you might, you could think of no other John in the world but John Macy. Polly barely knew John Macy, and had not spoken of him for years, but she would recognize him surely. “John,” you said out loud, or tried to. The raw air contracted your vocal chords. For a full minute, you swung your free hand around before you, reaching. The frantic motion seemed to revive Polly somewhat, so she then made you understand she wanted to use the toilet. So you half-carried her back indoors, across the kitchen to the powder room, there, to the right of where you are standing now. She was too unsteady to leave alone, and she had trouble with the girdle she always insisted on wearing even when it was just the two of you working at home. You had been together too long now for you to stand on ceremony, so you balanced her hands on your shoulders and helped pull down her underpants. You leaned against the sink waiting for her to be done, panting from the exertion and alarm. She reached for you when she was finished. You helped with her clothes again then made her splash a little water onto her face. She seemed more herself and you returned to the kitchen, but you had barely crossed the threshold when her legs seemed to give way. You caught her around the waist and slid with her to the floor, breaking her fall. It was then you felt for her pulse and realized she was having a stroke, or some other kind of seizure. You had never had any first aid training, so all you could think to do was try to keep her calm and quiet. There was a phone on the wall on the far side of the refrigerator. You felt sure that if you could get to it, you could dial for the operator and say, “This is Helen Keller. Emergency. Send help please,” well enough to be understood, but of course you would be unable to hear the operator’s questions or instructions. Polly seemed to be drifting in and out of consciousness. You tried to tell her that you were only going across the room to the phone, but she was frantic for you not to leave her. You wondered if you could drag her to the phone and get her to speak, but that seemed equally unlikely. And so you sat with her until the afternoon mailman noticed the open side door and came to investigate. As you calculated later, you were there on the floor with her in that state between life and death for almost twoand-a-half hours.

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You stand in your kitchen doorway and recall the event in perfect detail. “John?” you think, “Why did she say that?” because that’s the part of it you never understood. And you know you will never get the answer to that question now. Polly recovered from that stroke, but you never got the chance to ask her about it. It was only the beginning of the series of attacks that eventually killed her. You shake your head sadly. You cannot think of Polly without this feeling of regret. You wish you had somehow felt closer to Polly, after all those years together. You wish you had found a way to be a better friend to her. You betray her even now, because while you recall this terrible event from her life, all you want finally is to know something about someone else, someone who mattered to you in ways she never could. Evelyn, still by your side, notices your shaking head and touches your hand. “Don’t ever get old,” you tell her. “It’s a bad business.” “What did she say?” Winnie wants to know. Evelyn shrugs. “Something—I don’t know,” she says. Because your hand has only managed a few random letters. They resume the debate about lunch as Winnie puts away the groceries. Evelyn checks the feeding schedule taped to the refrigerator. She wants to finish with the mail and leave because Saturday is supposed to be her halfday. You know this is going on. You wish you could tell them not to worry so much about it. You are nowhere near hungry. It feels as if you only just finished breakfast. You feel the refrigerator and cupboards open and close. After a minute, you stamp one foot on the floor and say out loud, “I wanna hot dog.” They both turn to stare at you. “What did she say?” Winnie asks. “I think she said she wants a hot dog,” Evelyn says. Winnie comes to you and spells the question into your hand, and you spell back, “Yes, a hot dog.” When Winnie reports this, they both burst into laughter, and feeling it, you join in. Hot dogs were precisely the sort of thing Polly banned from the house. In the first few years after Polly’s death, you all took mischievous pleasure in bringing home foods Polly disdained: hot dogs, potato chips, TV dinners. You like to remember the three of you sitting around the kitchen table one night regaling yourselves with rainbow popsicles and Mallomars. As the laughter subsides, Winnie says aloud and to you, “But we don’t have any hot dogs.”

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“You could take her to the Bluebird Café or somewhere,” Evelyn says. “It’s a nice day. The air will do her good. Look at her, she’s feeling pretty chipper. Anyway, she had a good breakfast.” Perhaps knowing how Evelyn’s argument will run, you tell Winnie, “I had a good breakfast.” “Where’s the harm,” Evelyn says. “One little hot dog won’t kill her.” Will she eat these words later, Helen? Will the two of them huddle together, biting their nails, waiting for the autopsy results to reveal to the world that Helen Keller died due to the failure of her caretakers to stick to the prescribed feeding regimen? No. If they perform an autopsy, your brain is the organ that will interest them most, so the contents of your stomach will not excite much attention. So it is decided you and Winnie will go to the Bluebird Café. On the way to the car, you tell them, “You know Maeterlink once called me the girl who caught the bluebird.” You suspect you have told them this before, and even if you have not, it feels a bit pretentious to name-drop this way. Winnie says, “What did she say?” “Something about Mater—something,” Evelyn says, impatient to get back to the typewriter and then be gone. “I didn’t get it.” Outside the Bluebird Café, Winnie seats you carefully at a picnic table in the sun, then goes to the window to order your food. The air does you good: Evelyn was right about that. It has been more than a few days since you’ve been outside, you remember now. Was the weather bad? Were you still recovering from the sniffles? You can’t recall. Instead, you inhale deeply through your nose, tasting the many scents in the sun-warmed air. You sit with your elbows firmly planted on the table, your forearms perpendicular to the ground. You twiddle your fingers in the air in the way you have of feeling the temperature, which looks like you are either shaking down loose rings or beckoning butterflies. There are a few harried mothers with small children running to and fro. You feel the vibrations of their feet, and it makes you smile. Your keen nose samples their various aromas—bubble gum, damp hair, diapers. A small girl stops to stare at you, her eyes wide, her hand covering her mouth shyly. To her it looks like you are smiling straight at her. Without the cover of your hair, your ears stick out from your skull, as fragile as rose petals, and the sunlight glows through them pinkly. To the child, you look like a benevolent ghost or fairy queen. She smiles up at you. Then she throws back her head, lets out a squeal of plea-

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sure, and skips away. You feel a thin tingle in the bones of your face from the child’s glee, and it makes you smile more. Winnie brings you your hot dog with a wavy stripe of yellow mustard along its length. You lift it carefully in both hands and wave it back and forth beneath your nose, absorbing its steam in quick, delicate sniffs. Then you bite into it, enjoying the snap your teeth make piercing the skin, and releasing a small spurt of juice. “Good?” Winnie asks. “Mmmmmm,” you say out loud. After your second bite, you make perfunctory small talk with Winnie, asking her about her family. You recall she mentioned something about her sister-in-law and a mysterious health problem. Winnie latches onto the topic, and her hand chatters away about what this and that doctor has said and prescribed. You do not attend to her words but enjoy the warmth and movement of her hands. Sometimes a hand spelling inside yours feels like a small animal, a crab or something. The idea pleases you. A spelling crab. A spelling bee . . . You pause on your way back to the car to examine a great spray of honeysuckle in full bloom twining incongruously around a trellis near the trash cans. You cup both hands around a cluster of blossoms, press your face into it, and inhale to the full capacity of your lungs. The juicy scent collects at the back of your throat, and you swallow it rapturously. I notice that for once, the hot dog and the honeysuckle do not summon memories of hot dogs and honeysuckle of the past. You savor them in the fullness of the present moment, then let them go. Back home, you halt briefly to touch the wooden handrail that zigzags around your garden. Once, you used this to take long walks alone, but it’s been a long time since anyone has let you do this. You lift your nose to a passing breeze, scanning it for any trace of your roses. But instead of any perfume, only a series of words comes to you: Solfaterre, Jaqueminot, Nipheots, Gabrielle Drevet, Papa Gontier, Perle des Jardins. What are these words, what do they mean? They are the names of roses, your mother’s roses from your childhood. You smile, applauding yourself inwardly for retaining these words and recalling the feel of your mother’s careful spelling of them to you as you knelt beside her in the warm dirt. Such lovely exotic words. They thrill you still. It has been years since they’ve let you work in your garden, when it used to be part of your daily

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routine. Now, you long to dig in the dirt, to crumble and sift it through your fingers. You want to say some of this to Winnie but find your hands suddenly unable to form a single word. To cover this lapse, you pat the wooden rail in a way you hope she will understand to mean, “Just a quick turn around the garden?” Winnie hesitates, “Maybe later,” she tells you. “Nap first, then we’ll see.” Standing on the patio waiting for Winnie to unlock your door, you lift one arm as high as it will go, which is not high now, because your shoulder joint is stiff and your arm is heavy. Still, you manage to wave your forearm slowly back and forth in the air as if you are either conducting an orchestra on the roof or ushering an ocean liner into its berth. What does this gesture mean? If this were a movie, the patio would suddenly be full of shadowy figures, wispy grayish forms that would gradually take on the familiar features of people. They are all there—your parents, Teacher, John Macy, and hundreds more. There are all your dogs, too, some sitting up alertly, others standing, wagging their tails. These phantoms are translucent, but densely packed together, shoulder-to-shoulder. And they are all young, healthy, joyful, and heartbreakingly beautiful. As you raise your arm, they mirror your gesture, smiling, beckoning. Winnie wears a bright blue cardigan. This color and the colors of the potted plants around you make you in your pallor seem already one of the crowd of shadows rather than still a part of the solid, vivid world. But then Winnie gets the door open and leads you inside. Winnie climbs the stairs with you, seats you on your bed, and squats to help you off with your shoes. “Do you want your book?” she asks. You smile. This is one of the things you like about Winnie. Evelyn always forgets to ask you this. But you shake your head. You’ve been rereading Catullus, and it’s not what you’re in the mood for. Since she cannot read Braille, you can’t send her looking for something else. “No,” you say and pat her hand. “Thank you.” You lie down on the bed, stretching out slowly, arranging your limbs carefully for sleep. In a couple of hours, Winnie will come back and find you lying just as you are now, on your back, your arms at your side, your eyelids closed, the corners of your mouth turned up slightly in the small smile that is your face’s natural expression. She will describe you as looking

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peaceful, at rest, which will reassure everyone and prevent any possibility that Winnie or Evelyn can be held responsible. Clearly, you die without pain or struggle or fear. You are ready for the end, but I am not. Not yet. There is too much I’m still missing, too much I still want to know. But mostly I just want to know why it matters so much to me, of all people. Why me, Helen? Also, why you, and why this urgency? You can’t leave without giving me at least one answer. May 28 When I got home from work this evening, I found myself feeling inexplicably sad. Nick was not coming home for dinner, but it was not that. In fact, I was looking forward to being alone or, if not looking forward, I wasn’t unhappy about it. I considered calling someone to talk to, not about feeling sad, but just to have another human voice in my ear. But there was no one I wanted to talk to. So then I lay down on the bed and listened to the tape of your journal of 1936–37 which you started two months after Teacher died. And after half an hour, I felt much better. What does this mean, Helen? I’m tired—there’s that. I was at a conference over the weekend, where I gave a paper about you. It was reasonably well received, I guess. It’s always hard to tell. I don’t think people are used to thinking of you as a literary figure. But in any case, I’m tired from that, tired from travel. Then I spent all day yesterday and most of today writing e-mail related to the conference and generally catching up on things. Then in the afternoon, there was a reception for graduating students—prizes, parents, punch, and cookies. I was glad to go because there were students I wanted to say good-bye to. But it ended up only adding to my mood. It will come as no surprise to you that I do not do well in large groups. So I came home feeling exhausted, nervy, sad. Then I listened to your words and I felt better. Part of it has to do with the fact that I consider you my work now (Helen = work), so I felt better just to be reading your journal, just to have you on my mind. Getting back to my work made me feel myself again. But I think it’s something else, and I’m afraid to admit it. Every couple of years throughout my life, I’ve tried to keep a journal or diary, but I never

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manage to stick to it. I always find myself feeling ridiculous. And yet this weird, contrived correspondence I’ve been carrying on with you—what has it been, a year and a half?—now seems more natural to me. And listening to your words, even that journal that bears no relation to anything I’m thinking about at the current moment, feels like your half of the conversation to me. Your words have the power to soothe me. Soothe me? It doesn’t make any sense, Helen. I suppose it has to do with the fact that I don’t do well in large groups, and I’ve been spending a lot of time in large groups lately, first at the conference and then today at the reception. I admit it, I am a loner. I don’t play well with others. It may be a condition of being a writer. You needed solitude to write and often longed for more than you got. In my case, I know that the simple effort of human contact wears me thin. Is this a condition of being blind? I would like to think it is not. I get nervous by anything that implies a “disabled personality.” That way lies disaster, as you know. Still, I can’t deny that there are aspects of human interaction that we are excluded from. I realize that part of the stress I feel at large gatherings comes from the fact that I cannot look around the room, catch someone’s eye, send some sort of meaningful look to someone, as sighted people claim to be able to do. I have to wait passively until someone approaches. Also, sometimes when I am talking to people, I am uncertain if my facial expression and body language are doing whatever it is sighted people do to communicate nonverbally. Sometimes I feel compelled to say something, blurt it out, and I sense I seem blunt or abrupt. Other times I restrain myself, and then after the fact, I feel compelled to put it into words some other way, to write a note or an e-mail message. Coming out of context as they do, I sense these messages either overstate what I wanted to say or miss the mark entirely. I think you had it somewhat easier in this regard. You were generally the center of any gathering. You were the celebrity people came to meet. Occasionally you complained about the superficiality of this, the endless reception-line chitchat. In smaller groups, you did better. John Macy described somewhere how you sometimes felt people laughing around you and would start laughing yourself even before anyone had the chance to repeat the joke to you. You laughed just because everyone else was laughing. Oh Helen, this longing to belong.

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I could not talk about this to someone who is not blind. Actually, I’m not sure I could talk about it to someone who is. These are not universal blind experiences. Besides, most people I know would be surprised to learn I feel this way. I conceal the truth about myself remarkably well. Perhaps the effort I exert to conceal my vulnerability only adds to the trouble. For this reason, I feel I could talk to you about it. I have come to believe that your winning, outgoing personality was only skin-deep, protective coloration. We may be more alike than we think, you and I. And what do I really know of you anyway? You are something I’ve created, a receiving presence without substance. But you do the trick, and I won’t deny it. You were with me this evening. Your presence was small, cozy, domestic; but I felt it. We had dinner together. I put the tape recorder playing your words next to my plate. We ate grilled asparagus and zucchini, red lentils with tarragon, and couscous. Not a menu I imagine you ever ate in life. But you were always willing to try new things. And together, we had a conversation of sorts. You were talking about your dog’s litter of puppies and the clothes you were buying for your trip to Japan. And I was speculating over the flaws in my personality. It was not a coherent conversation; there were a lot of nonsequiturs and tangents leading away in different directions. But it was not unlike dinner conversations I’ve had with other people I know well. And as I say, it left me feeling more myself. So thanks for that, Helen. May 30 Yesterday, I took the plunge and sent you an e-mail message. I sent it to you at [email protected]. The contents are unimportant. In effect, it’s the same message I’ve been sending you all along. I am reminded of something A. G. Bell told you once. He had you press your hands against a telephone pole to feel the vibration humming on the lines overhead. He said that every telephonic communication, occurring a million times a day, was in fact only a repetition of the first he spoke to his assistant Mr. Watson: “Come here. I want you.” Just now, at a minute after midnight, I received this: “Cannot send message within 1 day, 12 hours.”

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204 Blind Rage

It says, “Auto-Submitted: auto-generated (failure).” It says your address “had permanent fatal errors,” so my “Message will be deleted from queue.” I feel loss, a lost opportunity, a failure to communicate. For thirty-six hours, my words to you were out there, wherever there is, waiting online with a hundred billion other messages. But mine was misaddressed, my very desire misguided. My words, those few pulse beats of human imagination, will now be deleted from the queue, shoved out of the patient line, rubbed out, gone without a trace. May 31 Last night I dreamed your hand. I saw a hand, a baby’s hand, and knew it was yours. I don’t know how I knew. It was simply a fact of the dream. What struck me about the hand was that though it was clearly the hand of a baby, it was less pudgy than most babies’ hands. The fingers had more muscular definition. It was a hand that had been used more than most babies’ hands, the way the hands of the deaf are used more. And the hands of the blind, too, I suppose. But of course, when you were the age you would have been when that was your hand, you probably weren’t deaf and blind yet, or maybe it had just happened. Maybe that was your hand at eighteen or nineteen months. I re-create the image in my mind, and this seems possible. Image? Yes, I saw it in my dream. I saw fingers, their length and delicacy. I saw the smooth, opalescent nails. To be accurate, I should say that I knew all these things about your hand more than I saw them, but I did have a general sense of what it looked like, its color, white to pale gold. And I had a sense of the texture of the skin, very smooth and moist. I wanted to see more, as I often do in dreams, wanted to move my gaze up the arm and see the face. But as generally happens in dreams, I had no such control. Instead the image faded or blurred out. The hand lost its form, and my dreaming mind was flooded with the sensation of color, lightness, brightness. It was the color of summer sunlight. And I felt a sensation of warmth and well-being. Your hand, Helen, reaching. Reaching for me? No. That I’m sure of. It was reaching toward my left as I looked at it, palm down, fingers stretching, though without desperation. Were you pointing at something? Were you offering your hand to be kissed?

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I find I can summon the image, the sensation, whatever you want to call it. I feel a tremendous warmth, very comforting, but also poignant. Moving me to tears. I feel my sinuses dilate and my brows pushing down. Reaching. I am reaching, too. For you? Sometimes I sense your presence so powerfully it’s as if I could reach out and find you standing there behind me. Sometimes there’s even a scent— lavender, rosemary, and lemon balm. It comes to me, and when I sniff again, it’s gone. Other times things happen and I kid myself, saying Helen’s here, or been here. Helen’s responsible. Helen’s handiwork. Yesterday, I was looking through Teacher’s letters for that quote about how the photographer made you. I opened the book, and there it was on that very page. Or last week, there was a power blip—a squirrel in the transformer or something—and I lost a couple of paragraphs I was writing about you. I managed to re-create them, but when I read them over, I decided I was better off without them. I tell the story to people and say, “I really have to hand it to Helen. She’s usually right about these things.” Now I dream your hand. I want to speak to you. Do you want to speak through me? Is that it? I don’t believe that’s it at all. I do not believe that you are reaching out to me. I keep holding out for some sort of dazzling revelation, or oracular utterance, or code to live by, and all you have to say to me is, “Can you give me a stamp for this letter?” Who are you writing to? Why won’t you write to me? I dreamed your hand, Helen. Your hand was everything to you. It was your way into the world. It was your way to bring your interior world out. Your hand. Are you there, Helen? Are you getting all this? The air is electric with your presence. The hairs on the back of my neck bristle with it. So what is it I want to say to you now that I have you here, wherever it is that we are, this world of words I wind around you and me? I press my hand flat against the computer screen. It is at first cool, then warm. Is that your hand on the other side of the glass, pressing back? The skin of my flattened palm grows warmer and warmer. There, right there, Helen. That’s the spot. Put your words there. Speak to me. You say, “Let it go, Georgina. Let me go.” So I will.

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June 1, 1968 You lie down on the bed, stretching out slowly, arranging your limbs carefully for sleep. Or perhaps you know you are arranging your body for how Winnie will find it later. You feel your body growing lighter, buoyant with that delicious feeling between sleep and waking. You are floating, levitating off the bed. You feel your very substance losing density. Your very atoms are drifting away from each other, dissipating in every direction. You fill your lungs with air to aid the process and feel the air all around you, under you. It is like a warm breeze blowing on you from all sides at once. But it is softer than that, like the warm breath of a dog inquisitively inhaling your scent. You are reminded of a ride you once took in a biplane. It must have been in the ’20s, whenever it was people rode in biplanes. You remember the event as a novelty, another of the many things you did before most people. But that was different. The rush of air in your face was more intense. And there was the vibration of the machine that encased you. There was a scent to it, too, of eucalyptus and dust dropping away, growing fainter as you rose. Now there are no smells and nothing encasing you, not even your own skin. There is only the sense of the weighty world falling away around you. It would be like swimming under water, except there is no effort to it in your body, and the medium that surrounds you is drier and utterly unresisting. And though you cannot find the words to describe this, the feeling is somehow familiar, known already, as if it is something you’ve been looking for all your life. There is a tingle in your fingers and toes as you, like a comet, begin to trail your substance in luminous streaks. Your hands. Your hands that have always been everything to you—the way in and the way out—are the first to go. But before they do, before you do, you begin to form or feel the words: “So this is what light is.” And at the last instant, the corners of your mouth lift in a small smile at yet again another word that means more than one thing, another pun, another puzzle, and then . . . June 1, Now Here’s a dream I had. We’re together, swimming in the Atlantic Ocean. I suspect it’s Cape Cod somewhere. It must be fairly late in the summer, because the water is not warm exactly, but not so cold it’s hard to stay in. We’re floating out

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past the breakers. I’m on my back. I feel the sun on my face and the way it warms the surface of the water. I paddle toward you. You are floating on your back too, perhaps thinking the same thing, so I don’t have to tell you. We are approximately the same age, more or less the age I am now. We’re not young but feel fit and healthy, limber and strong. The ocean swells and recedes beneath us like a huge body breathing. I hear you lift your head and shake water out of your ears. Your hand touches my arm, but you don’t try to spell anything into my hand. As if it’s a signal, we both ride a wave in to shore. We walk up the beach to where our towels are. We dry off. We feel wonderfully anonymous. Two middle-aged women in our modest black suits. No one pays us any mind. We sit for a while in the sun just long enough to dry off. A group of kids, teenagers, runs past whooping and squealing. We feel the pounding vibrations of their feet and the sting of the sand they throw up as they go. Suddenly, a cloud passes in front of the sun. Though we’re not close enough to be touching, I feel you shiver. And I know what you’re thinking. I say, “Don’t be sad, Helen.” You say, “I’m all right.” And I know that you are all right. Overhead, the cloud has passed. I know it was nothing. Only a little puffy cloud, only dense enough to cool the sun for ten seconds. You pat my hand. Your hand is completely familiar to me. It is a broad, big-knuckled hand, but the skin of your palm and fingertips is unbelievably smooth, and your fingers move with astounding speed and flexibility. As you pat my hand, it feels sisterly. Maternal? I don’t know. We are friends, you and I. We know each other’s stories, moods, limitations. There are topics we will not touch, others we mull over endlessly. We are alike in many ways, different in others. We have been friends long enough that the friendship matters more than agreeing about everything. Friends. I spell the word against the arch of my bare foot. Then, without another word, we get up. We gather our gear, fold our towels, start to trudge up the beach, the spray at our backs. We don’t need to guide each other. A person does not need to see or hear to know where the ocean is, and to know how to walk away from it. We feel each other’s presence at our sides. There’s a steel cable strung up the dune to guide us. We only glide our hands over it as we go.

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There’s a certain taste in my mouth, and I think it would be nice to have a beer when we get back to wherever it is we’re going. I’m not really much of a beer drinker, but I want it for the coldness of it, and the cleansing bitterness. Do you like the taste of beer, Helen? It strikes me as funny that I don’t know this. You’re a few paces ahead of me now, so I’ll have to ask you later. It’s a silly question, so there’s no urgency. And anyway, I know the conversation will continue. So until we’re in touch again, I remain, Your friend, GK

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A Note on Sources I drew heavily on Helen Keller’s writing both for the facts of her life and for a sense of her personality and predilections. Her second book The World I Live In (1908) gave me the most vivid impression of the day-to-day phenomenology of her deaf-blindness. Her Midstream: My Later Life (1929) provided the source for my narratives of her encounter with Andrew Carnegie, her experiences in Hollywood, and other events. I am also indebted to Keller’s many fine biographers. Nella Braddy Henney’s Anne Sullivan Macy: The Story Behind Helen Keller (1933) documents Sullivan’s early life, and includes material culled from the author’s private conversations and correspondence during her friendship with both women. Joseph P. Lash’s double biography Helen and Teacher (1980) remains the most comprehensive and well-documented work on Keller’s life. Kim Nielsen’s The Radical Lives of Helen Keller (2004) analyzes Keller’s often overlooked political activities.

Bibliography Henney, Nella Braddy. Anne Sullivan Macy: The Story Behind Helen Keller (New York: Doubleday, Doran, & Co., 1939). Keller, Helen. The World I Live In. Edited by Roger Shattuck (New York: New York Review of Books, 2004). ———. Midstream: My Later Life (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1969). Lash, Joseph P. Helen and Teacher: The Story of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan Macy (New York: Delacorte Press, 1980). Nielsen, Kim. The Radical Lives of Helen Keller (New York: New York University Press, 2004).

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Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller

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Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller

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Helen Keller (20th Century Biographies)

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Helen Keller: Activist (Women of Achievment)

The Radical Lives of Helen Keller (The History of Disability)

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To Helen II

Helen And Teacher, The Story Of Helen Keller & Anne Sullivan Macy

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To Ease the Rage

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