Helen Keller: A Life - Rilegato

Dorothy Herrmann is the author of several biographies, including Anne Morrow Lindbergh: A Gift for Life and S. J. Perelman: A Life. She lives with her husband in New Hope, Pennsylvania.

Excerpt from Chapter 19

Helen Without Annie

I ache all over as I remember how she grew thinner and thinner," Helen later recorded in the journal that she had started keeping after Annie's death to discipline her mind back to regular work. "I was glad she could not see my swimming eyes as I massaged her and noticed skin and bones where I had once felt the firm softness of her chest and shoulders.

"I live over the last few minutes of her earth life: the death rattle after an eight-hour struggle for breath . . . her darling hand growing cold in mine . . . the smell of opiates heavy in the room . . . sorrowing friends who drew me away so that her body might be prepared for the funeral . . . the Gethsemane I passed through an hour later when I touched, not Teacher's blessed face, but fixed features from which expression had fled. I feel again the recoil, the cry that escaped me, 'It is not Teacher, it is not Teacher!' . . .

"When she breathed no more, somehow the faith she had wished she could hold with me rose up stronger than ever and, leaning over, I said, 'You know, dearest, don't you, that life is beginning over again, glorious with light and peace.' Then it came over me that she was thinking of the joy of being reunited with her little brother, and I talked about him, feeling his nearness vividly. I wonder if her mind answered mine from afar. There was such a surge of memories sweeping over me, and I remembered the first joyous days of release when we spelled winged words to each other, and life was a continuous great discovery. . . . As I murmured to her I still felt the indefinable response of the spirit in her face. The change I sensed afterwards was more than I could bear. Everything was blurred. It seemed as if I should henceforth tread paths that led nowhere, climb steps that would lead to nothing because they could not bring me to her."

As Helen was communing with Annie's soul among the books that she had cherished, her grief gave way to ecstasy. "The body," she was convinced, "was only a shadow of the soul," and she knew that Teacher would never be far away.

On November 3 Helen traveled to Washington, where, at the National Cathedral, Annie's ashes were placed in the columbarium in the Chapel of St. Joseph of Arimathea. At the time of Annie's death Helen had received word that the bishop of the cathedral "will consider it a privilege to offer the right of sepulcher in the cathedral for Mrs. Anne Sullivan Macy . . . and that the privilege of sepulcher at the cathedral should also be offered to Miss Keller."

Annie Sullivan was the first female offered this distinction for her own achievements. "Among the great teachers of all time," the bishop of Washington referred to her in his address, "she occupies a commanding and conspicuous place."
At the committal service Helen spoke a few words that were recorded by a friend: "Blessings upon the receptacle of the precious dust which my heaven-sent Teacher wore as a garment as she wrought her miracle of liberation through Him who is the Lord of Life and Love."

In the hope of adjusting herself to her loss as well as escaping from the interference of well-meaning friends, she decided to visit Polly's family in Scotland. Two days after Annie's service, she and Polly, who had immediately applied for citizenship, sailed on a German ship, the S.S. Deutschland, for England. On the first night of the voyage Helen was plagued by dark thoughts and insomnia. Although Polly tried to break her mood of melancholy by reading to her with her fingers, as she used to do with the blind Annie, Helen could not concentrate. She regarded herself as a "somnambulist, impelled only by an intense faith." The following day was "a day dreadful beyond words" as she began to emerge from "the stupor of grief, and every nerve is aquiver. It does not seem possible that the pain flooding through my heart can ever be stilled but I know it is a sign of returning spiritual health."

Helen's despondency lifted when Polly, on their walks up and down the deck, described the gulls circling the ship and the white sea swallows that were capable of flying several thousand miles. The next day, however, she was again plunged into a deep depression. "What earthly consolation is there for one like me, whom fate has denied a husband and the joy of motherhood?" she mourned. "At the moment my loneliness seems a void that will always be immense." But then she remembered her work for the blind and the deaf-blind, as well as her unshakable belief in immortality and an afterlife in which she would be able to both see and hear, and her faith sustained her.

By the ninth day at sea, after a hearty lunch of frankfurters and sauerkraut, one of her favorite dishes, she noted, with pleasure, that her interest in philosophy, poetry, and travel was returning. Although she was deeply concerned about "the demoniac forces like Hitlerism" in Europe, her loathing of the Nazis did not prevent her from appreciating the "home-
like atmosphere" of the Deutschland and "the German love of beauty that greets my fingers." She was especially delighted by the bouquets of small and large chrysanthemums that seemed to be omnipresent, and her cabin, which even though it was small and "cozy," boasted every modern convenience.

Still, Annie's presence seemed omnipresent. On the tender to Southampton, she strongly felt her spirit, "tantalizing almost beyond endurance." Several nights before, on shipboard, she had a wonderfully comforting dream in which Teacher had kissed her, and "literally her face against mine breathed youth, sunshine and flower-sweet air. Since then I have had a sense of following, following, following her, and I keep expecting to find her somewhere--in London or up in the Scottish highlands that her Celtic soul loved."

On the train from England to Scotland, Helen had difficulty believing that it was just she and Polly who were in the compartment. Teacher had accompanied them on their previous trips to England, and Helen fancied that she was merely asleep; otherwise, she would be spelling into her hand "the charm of light or color of flying cloud." She consoled herself by the thought that Annie, for whom teaching had been "her work and her glory," was instructing "the sensorially crippled" in heaven. "My soul was so conscious of her presence I could not--I would not--say she was dead, and I do not now."

As the days went by, fresh life pulsed through her. She began reading André Maurois's Life of Disraeli, which, as a biography written in French by a Frenchman about one of Britain's most distinguished political leaders, appealed to her as an internationalist. Closing the book, she marveled for "the millionth time" at the freedom that literature had given her.
Politics and world affairs again began to deeply absorb her. Although she believed that world peace would triumph over the insuperable evil that was Hitler, her heart sank when she learned that forty million gas masks were being prepared for use in Britain and Scotland alone.

Her hatred of Hitler, "a Mephistopheles," intensified in late December when she received a letter from her German publisher informing her that he was going to delete her admiring views of Bolshevism and Lenin from the German edition of Midstream. The publisher, Otto Schramm, wrote, "I must today emphasize that I hope you meantime have become convinced of your error of judgment, and therefore feel obliged to let me know that your attitude now towards Russian Bolshevism has entirely altered since you have learned about the evil and monstrous destruction to which this world doctrine tends."

But Helen's views of Soviet Russia had not changed. Although she was becoming increasingly disturbed by the totalitarian government of the Soviets, she refused to believe, as Schramm asserted, in the Soviet purges and that millions of Russian people had been slaughtered; otherwise "that country would not now be emerging, as we know it is, stronger than ever from its age-long fight against hunger and ignorance. . . . No doubt Russia has committed blunders, grave ones; but so has National-Socialist Germany, and now it has reverted to the darkest of the Dark Ages. . . ."

She wrote Schramm an angry, impassioned letter, saying that she had no intention of deleting her views, as she knew about "Germany's anti-Semitic atrocities, fear-clamping state control over lives and homes, and imprisonment of thousands without trial," and that she planned to withdraw her book from publication in Germany.

Other world events also aroused a fiery response. When King Edward VIII abdicated to marry the American divorcée Mrs. Wallis Warfield Simpson, she had no sympathy with his plight. "I doubt whether His Majesty will reap from his decision the happiness he anticipates," she wrote in her journal. "There is a love of the people surpassing the love of a woman. . . . Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose. . . ."

Clearly the king's decision to give up his throne to marry Mrs. Simpson rankled Helen, perhaps because she herself had never been permitted to relinquish her public image as a handicapped icon for personal happiness. "Only through experiences of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired and success achieved," she continued. "Most of the men and women honored in history for their services to mankind were acquainted with 'the uses of adversity.' They triumphed because they refused to be turned aside by difficulties or opposition."

In Bothwell they stayed at the manse of Polly's brother Bert, who was a minister, and ...