Helen Keller in Love Read Online Free Page A

glass trembled with the vibrations of a train hurtling across the countryside just past the hotel. I imagined I was on the train with Peter, moving into the night with him. Instead I walked back to the bed where Annie sat and took her hand. She needed me so much. Was it wrong for me to want Peter—any man, really—to help me find a life apart?
    The trainin the distant woods left a taste like iron in my mouth.
    One thing I never said was how tired I was at times. What people respected most about me was my stamina. Especially that summer of 1916 when we fell into debt. Annie and I never liked paying bills, never liked to feel their envelopes, and now that our lecture tour was a failure because I kept talking against the war, we needed our investment returns; without them we couldn’t pay the maintenance on our house that August, or for the rest of that fall. Still, we never missed the chance to buy a new fur on Newbury Street instead of paying the water bill or the mortgage.
    Why didn’t we have enough money? Andrew Carnegie gave me a pension every year. The Sugar King of Boston, John Spaulding, gave me stocks to protect my welfare. Even Mark Twain, whom I met on a warm Sunday in New York, at a lunch in the home of Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence Hutton when I was fourteen, got his friend the “robber baron” Henry Rodgers, of Standard Oil, to help pay for my college education. I had no debt from those years.
    But as I sat in the upholstered chair next to Annie’s bed, I knew the truth was that Annie was dependent on me for a living, and all the money we made from lecturing, from my books, went to protect her and pay for my secretaries. Annie and I both needed food, clothes, a new roof on our house, and all the people we required to keep me looking “normal” in other people’s eyes.

    “The Starof Happiness.” That’s what Annie called me during the four years we performed as the “serious part” of a vaudeville show. From Boston to Los Angeles, in theaters ripe with the scent of workers’ boots and whiskey, we went on stage twice daily. I was thrilled; Annie, despondent. For our act she parted the velvet curtains to walk alone onto a stage arranged to look like a residential parlor. Silk dress rustling, the theater’s cigar smoke stinging her eyes, Annie stood beneath the hot lights to call out that no matter what trials I faced, I always met them with optimism and love.
    Then I came onstage.
    Guided to Annie by the tart scent of her rose perfume, I was exuberant. Backstage I had put on my own makeup, and as I walked out to my audience I smiled as I inhaled their warmth. Then Annie spoke my words. I was the Star of Happiness, because I knew the most important thing in life: love. Love and connection to others. That is what brought true happiness, I said. And I meant it. Music came up as our act ended. As the curtain fell, I felt the audience’s wild applause through my shoes.
    But we didn’t do vaudeville just for love.
    We also did it so that Annie would have money as she grew old.
    No matter that our fellow performers included a man who ate tadpoles. I was proud of myself. In our hotel, Annie, however, spelled into my hand just before sleep, “We have been miscast in life.”
    So we fell into debt that summer of 1916. Nothing new. We’d been in and out of debt for years and had tried everything: we had tried not reading the investment reports, we had tried tying them in bundles and putting them in sacks, we had tried making money by lecturing, vaudeville, but by age fifty Annie was worn out. This cough seemed a good reason to do what she had always fought so hard against. To lie down.
    And ifshe wanted to escape, it would be my duty to provide for the one person who gave up her life so I could have my own.
    Then just as the bedsprings shuddered and Annie’s heavy body leaned into the bed she said the magic words: “Helen, we’ve got to have Peter full time as your secretary when we get back home. I just can’t