Read Helen Keller in Love for Free Online Page B

understand.
    Peter acted as if he didn’t hear me. “Come on.” He pulled my chair out and gave my shoulders a shake. “Let’s get outside. Be part of the crowd.” The rumble of the Ferris wheel shook the room, making the air press against me. I still refused to move, and he said, “I get it. Maybe you go only where you’re invited to speak? Be up in the front, where everyone can see you?”
    “That’s a bit harsh.” I stood up straight. He
was
my employee, after all.
    He took my hand. “Come back here.”
    It was my turn to pull away. No matter how much I argued against being idolized, I was ashamed to hear from him how much my public image meant to me.
    I had learned early to live for others. To say, often, what they wanted me to say. When I was ten and already well known, my Mastiff dog, Lioness, ran into Tuscumbia’s town square, and a policeman accidentally shot him. I wept. When I wrote about my loss to Mr. William Wade, one of the wealthy men who provided money for my education, he published my letter in
Forest and Stream
. Thousands of letters arrived in my Tuscumbia mailbox: people around the world wanted to buy me a new dog.
    I waselated. But Annie told me to write back to them and say, “I don’t want another dog. I would like to use your kind offer of money to send a poor little blind and deaf boy named Tommy Stringer to school.” I wrote down Annie’s words in my square handwriting.
    My letter was carried by newspapers across the country.
    My words raised enough money for Tommy to attend Perkins for two full years.
    I was always helpful. Careful. I had learned to show only part of myself to others. Then people would never leave me. I would not be alone in my darkness.
    Ten years later, when I was at Radcliffe College, my composition teacher was one of the first people to tell me to write what I knew—that I had original thoughts. I responded that all my life I had written what I was told, or, at times, what I thought people wanted to hear, but in his class, as a young woman of nineteen, I wanted to express my real thoughts. Because it wasn’t just in my writing that I had lived for others. In newspapers published around the world there were pictures of me meticulously dressed, dancing the fox trot with a young man, but I had never been allowed to date. The world saw me riding a horse on my own, when outside the photo someone always held the reins. The photos were fun, yes. But they were untrue. They did not show my real life.
    Peter leaned over the hotel room desk. The moment of my annoyance with him passed. I suspect it was my bare neck that called to him.
    “I’ve written to my publisher,” I said, “telling them to give the royalties to blinded German soldiers and sailors. We’ve done it!—you and I. Annie would have my head if she knew, but not you. You’re a radical, like me. Together we can even help the Austrian soldiers.”
    Heput my hand to his mouth, and ran my fingers gently over his lips. “Don’t you want more than that for yourself? Why
shouldn’t
you?”
    The pounding of the carnival rides shook the windows of my room as Peter recounted the way I spoke out to audiences in Kansas, in tents in Nebraska, by lakes in rainy Wisconsin over the summer. How the audiences waited to hear about the “miracle” of this deaf-blind woman who speaks her mind.
    I felt as if a light fell over me. His voice flowed through my fingertips.
    “Don’t you ever want other things?” he said.
    I leaned into him.
    “Do you want to hear this?”
    “Yes.”
    “Helen, kiss me.”
    I felt his warm breath on my mouth. “Wait. Not yet.” I fumbled with the little glass figurines on my desktop, suddenly unsure. “Will you—” I moved suddenly toward the door and opened it for him to leave. “Give me some time?” I said, and stumbled over my opened suitcase. When I slipped, Peter steadied me.
    “I’m getting pretty good at this.”
    “Catching me?” I picked up the hem of my