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believed then that Peter would set me free.
    When the crowd filed out, the show’s manager came up on stage to give us our night’s wages. Right after he left Peter said, “Helen, is this really all you get for all this work?” He told me he’d taken out the manager’s 20 percent, and then the thirty dollars for his own salary. “The ticket sales were lower than ever, and twenty people asked the manager for their money back,” he added.
    I wasn’t the Helen Keller they expected, or wanted. But I didn’t care.
    “It was worth it,” I said.

    “Jesus,Mary, and Joseph,” Peter said later that afternoon after the show. I’d wolfed down two hamburgers with him at a burger shack by the hotel—Annie would never let me eat burgers in public: too vulgar, she said. But I couldn’t help it. With Peter I wanted to eat hot dogs, wear high heels, drink gin. “Here’s the problem as I see it,” he said. He’d just paid the lunch bill and was scribbling down the costs for the hotel and the food for our trip back to Boston the next day.
    “You don’t mind how much you take in, and I don’t know enough about your situation to give you advice.” We started across the lawn for the hotel. The sharp scent of pine trees filled the air, and the pine needles underfoot made the ground yield to my shoes. Into the bed of needles the day’s happiness slipped away. “If this keeps up, we’ll be lucky to get back to Wrentham with a few cents.”
    “We’ll work it out,” I said, my face suddenly cool as we walked under the hotel’s covered front porch. That afternoon I napped on my hotel room bed. I slept a deep, dreamless sleep. Night would come, and with it, Peter.
    I had no fear.

Chapter Seven

    T he blind are idolized for the wrong things. It’s strange. The praise I got for being “Helen Keller the miracle.” Everyone loved that. Some people even praised me for becoming a Socialist—a Wobbly, even—supporting the Lawrence strikers, working to wipe out slums in New York City, and rallying against wars around the world. I believed that plutocrat President Taft when, at a speech for the New York Association for the Blind, he asked, “What must the blind think about the Declaration of Independence, since they are not granted the same rights as others in our society?” In my blindness and deafness I proved I was equal—more than equal—in my intellect. But no one, from the time I was a young woman, would accept my having a lover. It was unseemly, somehow, a blind girl in a love affair. Torrid, almost. So I didn’t speak my desire, I hid it. While I marched for birth control, stood up for Margaret Sanger when she gave out leaflets in Brooklyn saying women could limit the number of children they would have, I wasn’t allowed to even marry, or consider having children of my own.
    I couldn’t accept that fate. That wasn’t enough for me.
    In my hotel room after my nap, the air was heavy with rain, and a wind blew in the ripe scent of the nearby town. Down the bare hall outside my room I detected the rapid, determined footsteps of waiters entering the dining room for the dinner shift, sorry to have left their girlfriends or wives. And me? At that moment I wasn’t idolized by anyone. I was a woman alone in a room, with nothing to do, and no one to guide me outside.
    Theaudience’s applause seemed very far away.
    All afternoon I waited. I read a German Socialist magazine in Braille, restlessly moving my fingers over the raised print, then walked to my window. The slanting, metallic vibrations meant workers were dismantling the Chautauqua tent. A rapid succession of blows followed. The high metal poles that held up the dome of the tent were being knocked down, reminding me of endings.
    The thumps and plunks of the dinner crowd faded; the granite rocks outside my window turned from baking hot to cool. Evening had come, the tour was over. Peter and I would leave the next day for Boston. Surely he would realize that he