Helen Keller in Love Read Online Free Page B

do it anymore. I’m going to make some arrangements. He needs to live nearby.”
    I’d never felt so alive—or afraid.

Chapter Five

    A marble cell of dark. Without sight or sound, sometimes my life felt like a prison. But in our Wisconsin hotel room, where the smell of cornfields and night rain filled the air and I knew Peter would be by my side, that cell of dark broke open.
    I sat head up in Annie’s room, shoulders back, feet planted solidly on the wooden floor. I was going to be left alone with a man for the first time in my life. “Are you sure?” I asked Annie, my hands searching for her mouth. I lip-read her response by pressing one finger on her throat, one on her lips, and another on her nose, so I could “listen” to her words. I didn’t want to mistake her answer.
    “For God’s sake, what choice do we have?” I felt the dry, wry tone of her voice through my hands. “Stuck in this godforsaken town with another talk to give tomorrow, and no way to get home by train if I’m this sick—he’s our savior, Helen. A flawed one, that’s for sure. If you saw the way he eats—crumbs all over his fingers—and I’d rather break stones on the King’s Highway than hear him spout off about politics. If I hear one more thing about those young girls who jumped to their deaths from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, landing on the streets of New York, I’ll scream.”
    I didn’t move.
    “Perfect he isn’t, not even close.” Annie’s fingers rapped my palm. “But he’s all we’ve got.”
    I said nothing, as if my breathing would give me away. The clock on the wall above my chair made a ratcheting vibration as one minute, then two went by.
    “But he’s still a man.” Annie’s palm gave off the tautness she always had when she felt an enemy was near. “You’re not to let him touch you. From here up,” she gestured from my waist to my mouth, “nothing. And from here down.” She passed her hand over my waist, hips, and upper legs. “Absolutely nothing.” I was so taken aback that I wanted to jump up and leave the room.
    The upholstered chair beneath me scratched. “Yes,” I joked back, to get her mind off how much I wanted Peter to touch me with those fingers of smoke, whiskey, and twine. Instead of answering me Annie leaned forward. The door to her room shuddered as if someone was outside.
    “Who is it?” I asked Annie.
    “A crowd of latecomers tromping into the lobby, no doubt. They shouldn’t come in this late. I saw them clambering out of their car this morning after a hiking trip to George’s Falls.”
    Hoping to keep her attention on them—on anything, instead of Peter—I said, “A whole family and they didn’t bother to come to our talk?”
    “Barely anyone comes to our talks as it is. Don’t you see?” She tried to lie against her pillows in bed, but her cough forced her up, and I held her as she bent almost double, her back under my hand a long tense coil. Then she got her breath and went on.
    “We used to talk about your ‘miracle’: how you came to read, write, go to Radcliffe—succeed. That’s what audiences want to hear. They don’t want to hear you now, going on about President Wilson and your ideas that this war is a capitalist disaster. For God’s sake, Helen, you can’t encourage people to form a general strike and refuse to go to war.”
    “Why shouldn’t I?” I said. “The capitalists don’t care—”
    “I already heard that speech,” Annie said, “when you gave it in Carnegie Hall. Helen,” she shook my arm, “come out of the clouds. I justcounted the receipts from tonight’s lecture: it’s
half
of what we got this time last year.” She dropped my hand and exhaled so hard I felt it in my bones.
    “In your talk tomorrow, no talk about war. Not a
word
. And drop that letter to the Germans in the trash. Do you hear me?”
    “Do I hear you?” I almost started a joke, but then remembered that Peter might laugh, but not Annie, not now. “I