What Is Visible
How little they trot me out for show these days
An excerpt from Kimberly Elkins’s vividly original literary novel based on the astounding true-life story of Laura Bridgman, the first deaf and blind person who learned language and blazed a trail for Helen Keller.
“WHAT IS VISIBLE contemplates the bare requisites of being human, more fundamentally than most meditations on haves and have-nots… A novel’s extraordinary power is to allow a reader to take possession of the inner life of another. This one provides entrée to a nearly unthinkable life, and while no one would want to live there, it’s a fascinating place to visit.”—Barbara Kingsolver, New York Times Book Review
“A wonderfully imaginative and scrupulously researched debut novel… [The protagonist] comes across as a willful, mysterious marvel, showing ‘how little one can posses of what we think it means to be human while still possessing full humanity.’”
—Publishers Weekly (STARRED)
“An affecting portrait which finally provides its idiosyncratic heroine with a worthy voice.”
—Kirkus Reviews
Prologue
Laura, 1888
How little they trot me out for show these days, and yet here I am this frigid morning, brought down from my room to meet a child, and me not out of my sickbed two weeks. They’re actually calling her “the second Laura Bridgman.” The second, and I’m still here! What am I supposed to do, bow down to her? Set her on my knee? I didn’t like children even when I was one, and now I think them worse than dogs. I’ve shriveled and so they’ve searched for another freak in bloom to exhibit and experiment on. It’s taken Perkins decades to find one pretty enough, quick enough. Well, pretty is really the important thing, or at least not too strange or looking like what she is. Not looking like what I am.
“Just talk to her,” Annie Sullivan writes upon my hand. “You have so much in common.” Like two in the throes of the plague might share tips and grievances? Yes, little Miss Keller and I will rattle on about our lives in our respective cells, and since I can’t taste or smell either—she’s got that on me—she can tell me how the succor of roast mutton and strawberries and the odor of feces and chrysanthemums have opened enormous windows of happiness and universal feeling that I will never enjoy.
She curtsies, I feel the whoosh of her skirts as she goes down, and then she is on me, too excited for them to hold her back, if they are even trying. Her hair is heartbreakingly soft—I had forgotten this about children, this wonder—and her face round and warm as a meat pie against my leg, clutching at my dress, reaching for my hands. Too much! I raise both arms into the air. Annie always had bad manners, so this assault is no surprise. In the years she shared my cottage here, she acted the queen since she had partial sight, but really she was dirty Irish straight from the almshouse. After everything, though, I do miss Annie greatly, and she’s done better than all right, it seems, as the teacher of this one. I taught Annie the manual alphabet, the finger spelling tapped out into the hand that is the only way to communicate with me and with Helen. Will she give me that credit, I wonder. And though Dr. Howe, Perkins’ director, disavowed Braille, Annie says she is trying it with her charge.
The girl steps hard on my foot, right on the big toe that is bent with the rheumatism. “Get her off!” I rap into Annie’s hand, and Helen is pulled back. We all breathe for a moment, and Annie takes the chance at last to greet me properly.
“Dear Laura,” she writes, “you look well.” Proof of her half-blindness right there!
“God tells me you are splendid also.” She is no fan of religion, Miss Sullivan; that will get her goat. “Congratulations on your work with this―”
And then the little hand taps again at mine, insistent as a summer fly. “Thank you for doll. I love very much.”
She is difficult to follow. “You’re welcome.”
“I’m almost nine. How old?”
What cheek to ask a lady her age, but then again, with my fame, it’s no secret. “Fifty-eight.” I try to walk away from her toward the heat from the window, but she grabs at my skirt.
“Please talk to me,” she writes. “Please.”
My presumptive heir is begging in my palm. And so I ask Helen my favorite question: “If you could have one sense back, which would it be?”
Her fingers go round and round in circles, and I can feel the girl actually thinking in my palm.
“Which do you pick?” she asks.
Though I have been deprived of all senses save touch since the age of two, while she is only deaf and blind, for me the choice is simple. “Sight,” I tell her, all the glorious colors God has painted on lands and faces. Green is the color I remember with the most pleasure: green from the grass outside our house in New Hampshire. Blue still spills from that square of sky visible over the bed where I lay ill for almost a year, and Mama says my eyes were bright blue before they shrunk behind my lids. Red I have a strong and disagreeable sense of, from when they bled me with leeches. And black, black I know the longest and best because it is my constant companion. These are the only colors I can recall or imagine with any clarity.
“Choose.” I tap Helen’s hand.
“Still thinking.”
What a serious one! The firmness of her fingers marks her as quite unlike other children I have known; she seems more like an adult in her faculties.
“Tell me,” she writes. “Tell me about you.”
My story? Everything? Heaven knows there are parts not suitable for a child. But maybe I could try, invoking the voices of others to join in, since much of the last fifty years is still a mystery to me. I fear this is my last season, so I will try. Yes. For Helen.
Chapter 1
Laura, 1842
“It is well for Laura Bridgman that she cannot read all that has been written and printed about her, for if she could, she would be very likely to be vain.”
—Youth’s Penny Gazette, September 26, 1849
“There she was, before me; built up, as it were, in a marble cell, impervious to any ray of light, or particle of sound; with her poor white hand peeping through a chink in the wall, beckoning to some good man for help, that an immortal soul might be awakened. Long before I looked upon her, the help had come.”
—Charles Dickens, American Notes, 1842
I count to a thousand, bathing my hands in the bowl of milk I have begged from Cook, turning them over and over, kneading the warmth into each crevice of my palms, soaking my fingertips until they pucker. They must be soft, soft as the unlucky day I was born, to touch the world and be touched by it on this important occasion. I wonder what would happen if my hands blaze so brightly that all of the people who have come to see me are struck blind by their light.
With the fingers of my left hand I skim the raised letters of the page, while those of my right rest in Doctor’s palm, as he waits for any questions I may have about my reading. The scratchy wool of his Sunday waistcoat sleeve tickles my bare wrist. Today, I have no questions because it’s all for show, not study; I finished with this primer, The Child’s Fourth Book of Grammar and Spelling, before Christmas. We host hundreds in the public hall for the usual Saturday Exhibition Days here at Perkins, but today we’re in the front parlor, and Miss Swift, my teacher, says there are only about forty very special guests.
Doctor places my finger on a sentence, and I copy it onto the grooved French board: “After the children had exhausted their inquiries and expressions of admiration about the learned dog Apollo, William asked his mother if she thought, at some future time, there would be schools for dogs.” So easy. Doctor holds up the board and the clapping drums through the soles of my shoes. Doctor had asked me if he could read out loud a letter I’m working on to send Mama in Hanover, but I told him no, not to the crowd. So I write a line now for him to read: “Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe rides all over Boston on his big black horse, then comes home to take care of Laura, his little dove.” Doctor takes the page, but I don’t think he reads it because there’s no applause. I perform four arithmetics―one each addition, subtraction, multiplication, division―and on the division, which is quite simple, I pretend to make a mistake and slap my right hand with my left, the way Miss Swift does when I make a real mistake, which used to happen often, but not much now that I’ve been here five years.
Doctor writes “London” into my palm, his thumb and forefinger in the shape of an L, and taps me to get up. Exactly three arm’s lengths down left from my chair I reach the embossed globe just as he sets it spinning, and the wooden continents rise under my fingers. I grab all of Europe, then trace my way to England and stop on its capital, the city of our guest of honor, Mr. Charles Dickens. The floor vibrates with the clapping, and I curtsy, which seems to generate more applause―they didn’t think I could curtsy? I whirl the globe to Africa, fingering the wavy ridges of the Nile, and turn again to the crowd. I’m laughing at my trick because I know we have no visitors from Africa here; the slaves are all down South. No one claps this time; I guess they don’t understand my little joke. Doctor pats my arm and pulls me down beside him at the desk. I’m not supposed to laugh hard, because Doctor says the sound scares people, but sometimes I can’t help it.
There are too many people around me now, the air full of their heat. When there’s a bigger crowd, the teachers push a row of chairs between me and them so they don’t crush me. Miss Swift says I am puny and too thin, but Doctor says I am a little dove, which must mean that I am small in an excellent way, because doves are soft and, I think, very beautiful. Where is Doctor?
I walk the twenty-three lady’s steps to my visitor’s seat in front of the fireplace, and find rough worsted draped over the padded armrest. Tessy and her dirty shawl are in my chair! She is my best friend of all the blind girls, so sometimes I let her sit there to warm herself on very cold days like today, but never when I have visitors. Everybody knows that. I grab for her hand to tell her to get up, but she hides it in her sleeve, so I push her, just a little. I try to hold down the ugly sound I’m not supposed to make, the one I’ve felt from Pozzo, the Institution’s dog, thrumming in the cords of his neck. Miss Swift comes suddenly between us—she’s certainly wide enough to keep two armies apart—and of course, Tessy jumps up for her, but as soon as Swift moves away, Tessy sidles back and writes very hard, “You’re not Jenny Lind, you know,” and skitters away.
I start to go after her—I’m a very fast runner—but that’s not how a civilized young lady of twelve should behave, especially at an afternoon exhibition. The blinds are all jealous because I’m the only one who gets to live in the Director’s apartment with Doctor and his sister, Jeannette, while they sleep in dormitories and have to share everything, even soap. I know I’m not Jenny Lind, but I’m not just some silly blind girl either. I straighten my day dress, the green one Doctor picked to match the shade that covers my eyes, and settle back into the cushions to wait for the people to come to me.
My feet hear Doctor’s boots at last. He is a very quick stepper and not so heavy on the floor as other men, like the one he’s bringing with him. He leans down and writes that he is giving me Mr. Dickens, who I’m told is even more famous than I am. Mr. Dickens sits on the settee and Miss Swift tucks in between us to translate. I feel him pitching forward, too close, as he takes my hand. His knuckles are so hairy I pray he won’t expect me to touch his face. I like to stroke the ladies’ faces, their necks and hair, even the old ladies if their skin isn’t too flappy, but Doctor’s is the only man’s face I touch, unless I’m requested to show my skill at identification. Doctor’s eyelashes are as long as a woman’s, as long as my whole thumbnail, and his sideburns curl around my pinkie. I have eyelashes too, but no one ever sees them because they might be frightened.
“He says you are the second wonder of North America,” Miss Swift writes, and then adds that only the roar of Niagara Falls is more impressive than what I have achieved in silence.
“You write books?” I ask. “Good?” I would like to have the Perkins press raise one for me so I could form my own opinion.
“They sell,” he tells me. “You remind me of girl in my last.”
“Real girl or pretend?”
“Pretend. Little Nell.”
Stupid name. I don’t know if it’s better to be a real girl or a pretend girl; that’s something I’ll need to think about. “Had scarlet fever like me?”
“No, but hard life like you.”
“She can see and hear?” I ask, and as I thought, the answer is yes.
“Taste and smell?”
Yes again.
“Then she is not like me,” I tell him. Everyone thinks Mr. Dickens is very smart, but I’m not so sure.
Miss Swift lays one of the purses I’ve knitted in my lap, and I present it: “For Mrs. Dickens. Carry her sundries.” Then I lie: “Made it special.” I hope he has a wife. I hope he realizes that people from all over the world come to pay half a dollar for my purses and crocheted napkin holders and handkerchiefs. I’m allowed to keep all my money, and I’m saving up for either a pearl necklace for Mama or a silver pen for Doctor to replace the one he lost last month, dear to him because it was engraved with thanks from the Greek Revolution he fought in before he founded Perkins. And he got Lord Byron’s helmet from Greece too. I’m not sure exactly who that is because Doctor says his poetry is too hard for me, but he must be very important because the helmet is displayed in a glass case in the front parlor. Tessy says that Doctor gets trunks of money from rich folks to pay for our food and our clothes and our teachers. I asked him about that, but he said that little girls should not concern themselves with finances. Miss Swift doesn’t know I didn’t actually make the purse special for Mr. Dickens, but if anybody found out that I lied to the famous author, I would have to sit by myself in the schoolroom until I apologized, which sometimes takes me a whole day and a night. The good thing―probably the only good thing―about writing in someone’s hand instead of speaking is that no one can eavesdrop. I don’t know how regular people manage to have any secrets.
“Scrubbed everything for you,” I tell Mr. Dickens. “Five floors. On my knees.” I had to help; Jeannette is such a terrible housekeeper that I find balls of dust whenever I check the floor in my room. I can’t see the dirt, but if you set me in a spot with a soapy rag and a bucket, I won’t move until you tell me it’s all spanking clean. I think one of the reasons Doctor keeps me in his apartment is because it would be a mess without me, and Doctor hates a mess, even more than Papa did. Miss Swift signs that it’s time for Doctor to give a speech.
And so from Mr. Dickens one last thing: “God bless you.”
“You also,” I write. Then he pats my head, and I try not to flinch, afraid a crinkled hair from his knuckle might slip into my braid like an old spider. I plaited my hair myself in one long braid wound tight in a circle at the back of my head. It’s very neat.
Miss Swift pulls a chair by mine and tells me that her hands are tired already, so she won’t be filling me in on Doctor’s speech, as she usually does. I don’t understand how she can be so tired when we haven’t even done much talking today, and heaven knows she never helps with the cleaning. I don’t really mind, though, because I’ve gotten the Exhibition speech a hundred times: charity; education; how Doctor founded Perkins ten years ago; how Doctor doesn’t like the Braille he saw in France and invented his own Boston type; and then he talks about me. I will sorely miss that part today.
I sit patiently in my chair until I feel the applause and I can tell everyone is rising to their feet, as they often do after Doctor, so I stand too. Then Doctor comes straight to my chair, but it pains me that he brings more guests, two stepping lightly who I know are women, and then one treading more heavily than a bear, Doctor’s closest friend, Charles Sumner. Sumner is too tall; even when he bends down, he’s my whole hand taller than Doctor. I was so scared of Doctor when he first came to see me in Hanover because he was the tallest person I had ever met until then. But I was only seven, so I didn’t know anything.
He introduces me to Misses Louisa and Julia Ward, sisters visiting from New York City, who are staying nearby in Dorchester. The Julia one is standing so close to Doctor that his sleeve grazes me when I reach for her hand.
“Lovely little girl,” Doctor says she called me, and then he is off to play with his other guests, leaving Miss Swift to translate.
The Miss Julia Ward is wearing a bracelet with huge triangles that feel like glass. “Diamonds?” I ask.
“Austrian crystals,” but they are sharper than the crystals in Jeannette’s jewelry. Maybe she is rich, like many people from New York.
I reach up to touch her hair. The women like me to play with their hair. They always invite me. Two long, crisp plumes stand straight on a tiny hat that feels like satin. It’s not a daytime hat; satin is what the ladies wear at night. And it has a jewel as well, a smooth, flat square. Definitely an evening hat. Her hair is pulled to the back much like mine, but I can still feel on the sides how silky it is—silkier than mine, thicker than mine or Swift’s or Jeannette’s or Tessy’s or Mama’s. I wonder if Doctor knows this. His own hair is almost that thick, and he isn’t missing any on the top like some men. There’s nothing more terrible than to explore a forehead only to find it goes on and on, especially if there are any tufted bits left sprouting like grass between stones. I check the front of Julia’s head, because women can sometimes be missing hair too, especially the old ones, but no, Julia has it all. I trail lightly down the curve of her cheek—I want to get to know her face better—but she suddenly leans away from me. Very rude.
“Excited for Oliver coming?” she asks.
“Who is Oliver?”
Miss Swift’s hand hesitates. “The one like you.”
She’s talking nonsense. I search the air in front of me for Doctor—where is Doctor? I stand and step on her foot. Sumner tugs at my upper arm, but I elbow him off and run through the room, cracking my knee against the corner of the chaise, grazing shoulders and backs as I circle toward the door, toward the bay window, the fireplace, and back again. Warm liquid spills down the front of my dress—someone’s tea, I suppose—and then I find Doctor’s coattail. He turns and shakes me by the shoulders, just like I’m trying to shake him, and then his hands go down and he writes on my wet palm, “Stop! Calm.” I am behaving like a wild animal, and making the noises of one too, coming deep from my chest. I let them rip.
“Who is Oliver?” I write.
“Hush.” He pats my back and guides me to a chair. “Little boy who is blind and deaf. Wonderful.”
“How old?”
“Eight.”
“Can taste and smell?”
“Yes. You’ll help teach.”
I shake my head.
“You’ll love him, Laura, as we love you.” I don’t think he understands me as well as I thought. He tells me that he’s off to town with Sumner and the Miss Wards.
He waits as I press my nails in. Miss Swift never lets them grow as long as I’d like; she cuts them every Monday morning.
“Let go. Now.”
I allow him to pry my hands from his, and he goes. The last of the footsteps thud away, but still I sit, not even in my visitor’s chair, but in a low, hard one by the bay window, letting the draft creep across my feet. I keep my hands shut, like a book with flat print that I’ll never be able to read, maybe one of Mr. Dickens’s, its pages filled with the joys and sorrows—no, the adventures—of someone like me. Oliver will come smelling flowers, sniffing Doctor’s coat, tasting peaches and custards and boiled sugar syrup and sausages and turtle soup. He won’t be like me. No one is like me. It’s really true, and I don’t know if that’s good or bad.
Chapter 2
Laura, 1843
“The two [Oliver and Laura] presented a singular sight; her face was flushed and anxious and her fingers twined in among ours so closely as to follow every motion…while Oliver stood attentive…then a smile came stealing out…and spread into a joyous laugh the moment he succeeded, and felt me pat his head, and Laura clap him heartily upon the back, and jump up and down in her joy.”
—Samuel Gridley Howe, “Tenth Annual Report of the Trustees of the Perkins Institution,” 1843
Doctor pulls me onto his lap in the leather chair by the fire after supper; he is wearing his flannel robe, and I am wearing mine, because a shiver of winter runs through our apartment. He takes a walnut from his pocket—he always keeps some there for me—and lets me squeeze the nutcracker as his hand waits below for the prize. No other nuts please me like this one: the shell is the hardest to crack, and the meat is deeply ridged, each half different. Doctor says they are shaped like tiny brains, and like the nuts, each brain is different. Phrenology, the study of the bumps on the skull, is Doctor’s favorite hobby, but he tells me that I am too young to learn it yet. He drops the nut into my open mouth. That is our agreement—if he lets me open them, I have to eat them—but tonight, he gives in, as he sometimes does, and takes the other half I tap against his teeth. He allows my fingers to travel over the face I know as well as my own: the strong, wide brow and bushy eyebrows; the straight perfection of his nose between the deep-set eyes; the bristly fur of mustache half covering his upper lip. And his beard, Doctor’s beard—I could spend an hour curling each hair around my finger.
“Enough,” he signs on the hand he pulls from his whiskers. “Oliver is coming tomorrow.” I write nothing, as if I have no concerns. “Spending the night in town before they deliver him.”
My parents did not deliver me to Doctor; he came to Hanover and took me. Papa did not even walk us out to the carriage; his last touch was when he pried my fingers from the doorframe.
“Your blue dress,” Doctor says. I am dressing for a blind? “Invited the newspapers.”
“Oliver isn’t famous.” Not yet, anyway.
“Historic, your meeting.”
“Like you and Longo?” The first time Longfellow and Doctor met, they talked for eight hours straight.
“No,” he writes. “A meeting between two of God’s best creatures.”
The newspapers are not coming because Oliver and I are two of God’s best creatures, I know that. “Like General Tom Thumb and the Feejee Mermaid?”
He puts another walnut in my hand, and together, we crack it open. “You hurt my heart,” he writes. “Barnum is a showman.”
He sits so far back in his chair that I almost fall off his knee. I lift his hand from the arm of the chair to write my “sorry,” but he balls both hands into fists. We sit still together for a moment, as we often do, but this time the stillness is full of Doctor’s disappointment. He lets me uncurl one fist: “I will help with Oliver.” He pulls me close to him then, my head settling in the familiar nook between his neck and shoulder, and I am his own little mermaid again, swimming in his warm waters.
The hall is crowded. The boy has come. For once, I try to stay back, invisible, leaning against the cold marble. Miss Swift writes that Doctor is pointing out the luxuries of our new Institution: the long, curving stairways; the carpeted, high-ceilinged rooms (Swift says you could stack five of me and still not touch the chandeliers). It’s so fancy because it used to be the Mount Washington House Hotel. My first years, we were still in Mr. Perkins’s house downtown on Pearl Street, but now here we are on Bird Lane in South Boston overlooking the bay. What a world away, Doctor tells the crowd, from the nearby House of Industry for Paupers and Orphans and the Boylston School for Neglected and Indigent Boys.
I figure he’ll go on for hours with such an audience, but then Swift tugs me forward. Doctor writes “Oliver” and then places the boy’s fingers on my eyeshade, and on my ears, and then upon his own. I can’t tell from the child’s movements if he understands anything at all—who knows? And then, without warning, Doctor pushes me smack into the boy’s chubby arms, our faces so close that I feel the air sucked quickly in and out of his nostrils as he sniffs me. It is violent, it is rude, but still I wish I had that talent. I do not struggle, but I do not embrace him, either; I hold myself up as tall as I can, and I am taller than he is, his bangs swishing against my cheek. I tense as Doctor lifts my arms, but allow him to put them around the boy. It’s like holding one of Cook’s potato rolls risen with too much yeast and come to life. His hair is as downy as a girl’s one hour out of the bath.
Suddenly, he drops to the floor, and I am afraid he is after my shoes, but he scuttles away from me. There is a jarring, and then Doctor pulls him up beside me, and everyone is jostled about. I search for Swift’s hand, and she says that Oliver felt the warm air blowing from the grate of the furnace beneath his feet and knelt to inspect it with his tongue. It’s true that there are no furnaces like the one Doctor had built especially for us, but it is not worth licking. I can’t stop laughing; I don’t care if his parents hear me. I was worried about a boy, and here they have brought me only a dog to play with. That’s good then! I have long wanted a pet, as long as he is not too hard to clean up after. Poor Doctor—I wish I could see his face—does he show the embarrassment I am certain he is feeling?
He has recovered, though, and he puts my hand in Oliver’s. I don’t resist my pet. The fat, little fingers grip mine, and he trots forward, pulling me with him down the long marble hall, though of course he has no idea where he’s going. He is off exploring the walls, the floors, jerking me this way and that, and he shakes with laughter at everything. Is Doctor sure the boy is not an idiot? No one in his right mind could possibly be this jolly about touching doors and walls. I remember the great terror that seized me when I first arrived, when everything and everyone was new and strange, and I had no way to know any of it, for good or for ill, except through my fingers. But Oliver doesn’t even tremble, except occasionally with delight. Maybe he is not afraid of anything because his parents are here with him. Does he know they are going to abandon him within hours?
Swift and Doctor rein him in, and they are now beginning the official tour. Swift says they’ll start with the boys’ dining room. I rush ahead to brush each of the six long wooden tables for crumbs. I wonder if I should check with Cook to make sure she is presentable, if Doctor decides to show the kitchen. Thank goodness Oliver is a boy, and won’t be at the table snuffling through his food between me and Tessy. Next I throw open the heavy doors of the gymnasium, and spread my arms wide so the visitors can take in everything: the climbing ropes, the ladders, the yardarms, and mats. Even the director of the Pennsylvania Institution for the Blind was shocked at the wonder Doctor created for us, and how rough-and-tumble we play in it. I’m not big, but I can wrestle most of the older girls to the ground, though I have been barred from such play temporarily for biting. I have excellent teeth. The people are moving around the room, and I would climb the rope all the way up for them and pose in the warmth of the sunshine from the top dormers if I had on my romp skirt and tights.
Doctor is behind me, his pocket watch thrumming through his waistcoat against my back as he presses close. “Tell the gentlemen from the Herald and the Evening Transcript what you think of Oliver.”
Doctor offers me the slate to write on because there are too many hands to talk to, and I freeze: he is a dog, he is a dog is all I can think. Puppy? No, he is a boy, a good boy—what did Doctor say? He is a creature, he is God’s creature. I remember something Swift’s brother was going on about last week, and I think it might sound nice. “Oliver is the lamb of God,” I write in big letters, and hold the board up for all to see. The floor vibrates—not applause, it seems, but low laughter—and Doctor grabs the board. I don’t understand. Lambs are sweet and gentle; it is a much greater compliment than the boy deserves. Swift stops me as I try to go upstairs with the group. I know Doctor will be showing the students’ rooms in the boys’ wing, and I want to see if Oliver gets a room by himself like mine in Doctor’s apartment.
“Doctor wants you to stay,” she writes.
“Why?” I know I did nothing wrong, yet there is a little burr of worry beneath my skin.
“Wrong to call Oliver lamb of God.”
“Everyone likes.”
“Not a real lamb,” she writes. “Bible symbol for…”
I wait, but she doesn’t continue. Swift does not communicate well, like Doctor or like me. “Give me Bible like the blinds. I’ll learn it.”
Swift holds my hand more gently. “I try, but Doctor says no.”
I won’t be able to wait much longer, because God is the one person in the whole world that I have the most questions for.
True to my word, I am helping Miss Swift attempt to teach Oliver, but he is a very dull scholar, just as I forecast. A hundred times a day for the last month, I have moved his fingers from the metal raised-type labels for fork, spoon, and pen to the actual items, and back again. A few times he has been able to imitate my motions, but then he seems to forget and goes back to his fidgets. Doctor says that within two weeks, I’d already matched the labels of over fifty objects and was on to arranging the individual letters into words. Oliver didn’t come down with the fever until he was three and a half, more than a year after I did, so Doctor thinks he should remember more from what he heard and saw. He was talking a blue streak by then, his parents said, and yet all he does now is make pantomime gestures. He finally does understand that, like him, I can’t see or hear, so he pats my hand or my face when he wants my attention. He has different pats for good, bad, stop, and hungry. I am sure he will never learn real finger spelling. At first I didn’t like it myself, but then Doctor told me that each handshape not only represents a letter of the alphabet, but also stands for a particular prayer taken from a book written by a Spanish monk over three hundred years ago. If a monk was too sick to recite a prayer, then he would just make the handshape for it. I like to think I am constructing words and sentences out of prayers, though I am still not sure that God receives them.
Doctor worked with us the first weeks, but then he got frustrated with Oliver, and now he’s gone to New York to raise money for the school. That’s what he says, anyway, but I know he is visiting with Julia Ward. He used to say that New York City was only fit for vermin, but last week he didn’t laugh when I made a rat joke about the Ward sisters. He has made more trips there in the last months—four, to be exact—than he has ever made before. “Are you counting?” Jeannette asked me, and I said, “Yes, ma’am, I am.”
Before he left, Doctor told me that he is impressed, however, with how Oliver is taking to workshop with the other boys; he has already woven one manila doormat and is working on a basket. I wish the girls got to go all the way to the East Fourth Street workshop every afternoon, walking holding hands along the water. I would tie the biggest, most comfortable mattress in the world for Doctor, and beat all the boys at chair-caning too. Instead, I must stay here with the blind girls knitting and sewing, washing and ironing, until supper at six. Those things are better practice to fit us to be good wives and mothers, I’m told. We are kept from the boys—or more likely, them from us—for everything except assemblies. I have only had occasion to meet with them then, and I am pleased with our separation because their touch is rough and their fingers grimy. Only Oliver is allowed to mix with us girls, and I help keep him very clean, going over his face and hands regularly with a wet rag.
Of course, I have my Laura dolls to practice mothering, all ten of them, the twelve-inch likenesses of me that are sold across the country, with their eyes poked out and little green grosgrain ribbons tied over the eyeholes. I sent Mama one for my baby sister Mary, and Mama wrote that the doll looks just like me. Pretty, Mama said, and well-formed. It is such a treat to touch myself, to run my fingers down my tiny nose and up and down my smooth legs beneath the dress. I wish that the fingers bent so we could have conversations, though I know they wouldn’t be real. Still I write in my favorite Laura’s hand sometimes, secrets and stories. I know which one she is because she is the only one whose hair I wrap up in a bun and tie with ribbon like a lady’s; the rest have hair that hangs loose and straight down their back like mine. I can’t wait till I can twirl it back and carry it on top of my head like Julia’s. I used to let some of the older girls hold tea with me and all the Lauras, but then last month after tea with several of the girls and their dolls, I did the count and there were only nine Lauras. I understand the others would be jealous not just because I have more dolls than they do—most have only one—but that my face is so famous that little girls everywhere want to play with me. To show that I am generous, I gave Tessy a Laura on the condition that she not change her name and that she sleep with her every night. Sometimes I sleep with Tessy too, a Laura nestled between us. Every night before I go to bed, I brush each one’s hair with a miniature brush the mayor’s wife gave me, and on waking, I smooth their long white dresses. I ask Swift if any of their dresses are dirty from sitting on top of the armoire, even though I dust them with a feather duster every week, but she always says no. She’s just lazy and doesn’t want to help me with them. Swift asked if Oliver could join Tessy and me at doll tea on Sundays, but I said, “Of course not, he’s a boy, he might break them.” I am their mother, so I am responsible for their well-being.
Even though I won’t let Oliver play with my dolls, I’m very careful with him, like a mother; I make sure he doesn’t cut himself on the sharp edges of the metal labels, but today I slit the tip of my own index finger on the label for book. I tried to clean it up, but Swift said I was just making more of a mess. I wish I could have seen my blood, which Doctor says is red, dripping all over Oliver’s desk, and maybe even splattering Oliver. I couldn’t tell how much there was, but my finger was very wet, the bandage soaked through in five minutes. It doesn’t actually feel bad to get a small cut. I think having my whole arm chopped off with a sword would be awful, but this little bit, this little hurt, fills me up inside in a way that is quite nice. I slip the metal label into my pocket.
I’m so glad it’s finally recess. “Teaching is much more tiring than learning,” I tell Swift as we straighten the classroom, and she agrees. Doctor doesn’t like me to miss exercise, so I hurry to the gymnasium. Most of the girls are already here, and the floor shakes with their game. They skip one way, pause, and reverse, so that means it’s Ring a Ring o’ Roses. I love that one, even though part of it is singing, which I can’t join in. The falling down part is good. I walk to the circle, and reach out when it stops, but these two, Susan and Mary, the oldest blinds, keep their hands locked tight—it is Susan, I think, who took my Laura—and then the circle spins again. When it stops, I find Tessy’s shawl in my hand, but she skips away from me. Then to my surprise, it’s Oliver’s shoulder I touch, and then he is jerked away. The girls have never let any boys into their ring before. I back away from the circle and feel the heavy thuds as they all fall down, Oliver no doubt laughing and laughing among the tangled limbs. I rush in and grab Tessy’s arm as they stand up.
“Why wouldn’t you let me in?” I write.
“Susan says you smell bad.” She walks away quickly with the rest of them. I’ve read that animals and foods can smell bad, but I didn’t know that people could smell bad. What could I smell like—the bread and butter I ate for lunch? the pencil I used for lessons? my dress? Maybe it’s the blood from my finger; maybe blood has a terrible, terrible smell. As the girls file out, I stand with my back against the wall, holding on to one of the climbing ropes. And then there’s only Oliver, who has come over to tug on the rope, or maybe because my smell is so strong that he knows I’m here. I hold my bandaged finger up to his nose and let him get a good, long whiff. He doesn’t move away, so I slide my whole arm back and forth under his nose, almost smashing his face into it. Finally he raises his head, and almost as if he knows what I am asking, he gives me his double pat along the cheek, his sign for good. I lift him up and help him climb the rope.
Chapter 3
Chev, 1843
Nothing was sweeter. He watched their hands: Laura’s thin white fingers etched her thoughts on Julia’s upturned palm, and then they switched, and Julia’s fingers, plumper but even more dazzlingly white, responded. The last slivers of winter light made a halo of fire of Julia’s red-gold hair, shining against the dark of Laura’s braids as they bent their heads together. His beloveds, the sun and moon in his little heaven. Julia looked up at Doctor and smiled, as if she understood the pure delight he took in seeing them together. She didn’t look the ten years older than Laura’s thirteen.
Laura sensed the slight shift in her audience’s attention and tugged at Julia’s cuff, still writing. In her score of visits in the past year, Julia had mastered the mechanics of conversing with Laura as quickly as any he’d seen—far quicker than Longo or Sumner—but she was not yet ready for Laura on a tear. Finally, Julia raised her unpinned hand and waved.
“She’s gone wild that I’ve called you Chev,” she said. “I didn’t know your nickname was a secret.”
“It’s not, but the children here don’t call me that.” He walked over to the settee and took Laura’s hand.
“Thank you!” Julia shook her arm out. She could be very dramatic. They both could.
Laura pulled Doctor down to face her. “Why Chevalier? Leaving again to fight in Greece?”
“No. Chev a silly name.”
“Like when I make noise for Oliver or Swift?”
“Yes.”
“Are you talking about me?” Julia asked, leaning over Doctor’s shoulders to watch his hands. Her breasts pressed against his back as Laura’s nails pressed into his palm. He was sandwiched between one of the most acclaimed beauties of the Atlantic seaboard and the most written-about miracle girl in the world.
“Are you talking about me?” Laura asked. He freed himself from both of them and stepped away without an answer.
“Dr. Combe will be here in the morning,” Doctor told Julia. “Let’s get you back to the Misses Peabodys’ before it gets late. I’ll tell Brownie to get the carriage ready.”
“You’re serious about that? I really must have a phrenological exam before we can be officially pledged?” She sidled over and put her head on his chest, those auburn curls he dreamed of pulling rippling against the point of his beard. She only came up to his chin. In a couple of years, Laura would be the taller one.
“All my success here at Perkins is built upon phrenological principles, my dear. Combe is traveling all this way to meet you—how could I not let him believe his opinion is of grave importance? He is Spurzheim’s protégé!”
Laura stood up and edged toward them, and Doctor broke the embrace before she joined it.
Combe was already set up in Doctor’s office the next morning when he came in. Laura sat in the student chair and Julia perched on the edge of the desk. Julia wore a blue sprigged muslin that Doctor hadn’t seen before. She would find that she wouldn’t be buying new dresses every week when they were married, but that news could wait.
“You shall have your hands full of heads here, Combe,” Doctor said. The phrenologist was almost seventy, but his handshake was still crushing. “Get your calipers ready!”
“Work Laura first, please,” Julia said. “I would like to observe before I am examined.”
Laura reached out to Doctor. “Have surprise for Julia,” she wrote. Whenever she had a secret, she signed the letters more quickly.
“After the exam,” he wrote equally as quick. It was their equivalent of whispering. She nodded and sat back in her chair, ready for the doctor. He had examined her annually since she arrived six years ago.
Combe stood behind Laura and placed one hand on each side of her head, but he spoke to Julia, who had come closer to watch.
“The brain is made up of congeries of organs,” he said as he drew vertical and then horizontal lines on Laura’s head with his index finger. “Each one corresponds to the thirty-seven innate and independent faculties of man. Each faculty, be it emotional or intellectual, has its seat in a particular region on the surface of the brain, and the size of that region shows the development, or not, of that faculty.” He parted Laura’s hair with the calipers and gently pinched the skin at the front of her skull. “The coronal, just above and behind the forehead, shows enormous growth since last year, especially in relation to her animal region, back here above the nape of her neck. The coronal is the seat of the moral faculty. Right behind her eyes, the organ of language, ah yes, continuing to grow, right on schedule.”
Combe validated that Laura’s brain was responding to Doctor’s rigors and nurturance, just as he had hoped. Before his work with her, the world believed anyone this impaired to be doomed to imbecility, incapable of rational thought or the natural questing of the spirit for the divine. He had proved them all wrong. Not since Itard’s progress with the Wild Boy of Aveyron had anyone created such a stir, and Doctor and Laura already had achieved far more than that feral child and his mentor. Doctor was now the foremost discoverer of the inner workings of the human mind and soul. Like William Parry at the Arctic, he had planted his flag on the farthest shore of the world, unexplored country.
Laura sat perfectly still. She seemed to be enjoying it. Combe continued his exam, stopping periodically to take notes on a small pad.
“Oh, Miss Ward,” he said, “you should feel this. The bump of hope. On the left side below the braid. Very modulated. Do you want to touch it?”
Julia looked closely, but shook her head. Doctor moved Laura’s braid. Yes, he was right. It was pronounced.
“You know, Howe, the girl started out with such a promising head—the contours have always confirmed naturally vigorous moral and intellectual powers—but my, what you’ve done with it!”
Doctor thanked him and tapped Laura to get up.
“My head good?” she wrote, and he told her the news of her growth. She clapped.
Julia sat down in the chair in front of Combe. “I’m a little nervous, I must confess,” she said. She looked at Doctor. “There’s so much riding on something I can’t control.”
“It will be fine,” he said. “Let’s see what she’s got, Combe.”
Julia closed her eyes as Combe picked and measured. “The anterior lobe,” he intoned, tapping the right side of her head. “Very well developed. Knowledge and reflection. Self-esteem, love of approbation―you two share these things, Howe. And here”—he indicated a spot behind her ear—“quite the combativeness bump.”
Julia opened her eyes.
“Almost as large as yours, Howe, if I remember correctly.”
Doctor smiled at her. They would be fine; a little combativeness can be countenanced. Combe had found nothing terrible, no great aggressiveness or lack of order or causality.
“Dr. Howe has one of the largest affection bumps I’ve ever seen on a man. Most women don’t even have them his size—like a walnut—though yours is close. I told him last year he’d better find a girl on which to exercise its benefits. The most eligible bachelor in Boston, over forty with no wife and that enormous bump. A sin, I told him!”
Doctor could have done without his friend sharing this particular knowledge. “That’s not why I came knocking, my dear,” he told Julia, though that wasn’t entirely the truth.
“I’ll take your word,” she said. “Bumps and all.” She laughed as she rose, and Doctor saw that old George was as charmed as most—dare he say all?—men were by his Julia. She laughed as much as any woman he’d ever seen, and yet managed not to be aswoon with frivolity. It must be the eyes, which had a way of looking smart even when her mouth was open. A rare talent for a female. If her laugh were too high, like a schoolgirl’s, or too low, like a washerwoman’s, or too long in duration, like a spinster’s, or so short, like his dead mother’s, God rest her soul, that it might be mistaken for a hiccup, then Doctor would not have been able to consider a life with her, no matter the light of devotion in those large gray eyes.
Laura tugged at his arm. “Julia’s head like mine?”
“Almost exactly,” he wrote, and it was true. They actually had far more in common than Doctor and Julia did.
“Dr. Combe, Oliver is waiting, and then the other children are lined up for you in the main hall,” he told the phrenologist. “And I’d like you to take a look at my six teachers’ heads too, if you could.”
“Of course,” Combe said and paused before Julia. “I hope to wish you the best in the near future.”
Doctor showed him out, but as soon as he returned, Laura erupted in a low howl―“Whoowah! Whoowah!”—over and over again. She cast about for Julia’s arm, but Julia moved quickly out of her reach.
Julia looked frightened. “Why is she doing that?”
Laura made the noise louder, and now he understood. “It’s her surprise,” he told Julia. “She’s made a special naming noise for you.” It was really quite good; she must have been practicing for a long time. “She has noises for everyone she likes, and each one sounds completely different. Well, not completely, but different enough to recognize, anyway.”
Julia sat down in the chair farthest from Laura. “Oh,” she said, “that’s very sweet. It is. Tell her thank you very much, but could she please stop.”
“Julia very excited,” Doctor wrote. “Wonderful present.” She howled again. “But stop now.”
She quieted down and settled back into her chair, smiling, drumming her knees in satisfaction.
Julia said, “Well, that put a little damper on my surprise for you. I don’t know how it will compare.” She reached delicately into the front of her bodice with her thumb and forefinger, and Doctor was glad Combe was not there for whatever was coming. She pulled out a folded sheet and opened it, then arranged herself in front of the fireplace, resting one elbow on the mantel. She cleared her throat.
“A great grieved heart, an iron will,
As fearless blood as ever ran;
A form elate with nervous strength
And fibrous vigor—all a man.”
Laura asked what Julia was doing.
“Poem,” Doctor told her and signed the verses as Julia recited them. She was a slow but excellent declaimer.
“One helpful gift the gods forgot
Due to the man of lion-mood
A woman’s soul, to match with his
In high resolve and hardihood.”
He didn’t finish writing the poem for Laura; he stopped at “lion-mood.” She didn’t need to know yet that Julia would be his wife. He would tell her when the time was right.
“Brava!” Doctor clapped. “Your poetry almost does your beauty justice.”
“So we are matched then, now that Combe has combed my head for flaws?”
“In high resolve,” he told her. “And so your lovely poems from now on, as we discussed, will be only for private consumption, yes? No more trying to publish, flying them out there in the world?”
“Yes, Chev,” she said, but she wasn’t looking at him. “Of course.”
“I don’t want a marriage of two minds, my darling, but only a marriage of two hearts.”
“You have mine,” she said, coming into his arms. Laura stood by her chair, her face turned toward them in rapt attention as if she were truly listening to every word. Doctor was not comfortable holding Julia with Laura this close, so he left the room and went to check on Combe’s progress with Oliver.
Combe had just started on Oliver’s crown when Doctor heard Julia shouting. He rushed down the hall and from the door saw the two of them locked in a strange embrace, Julia’s hands on Laura’s shoulders as Laura thrust her finger in and out of Julia’s ear. He grabbed Laura’s arms and pulled her away, her index finger still poking the air, and pushed her roughly back into her chair. Julia collapsed against him, her breath ragged. They were both breathing hard, and then Doctor realized so was he.
“Did she hurt you?”
“Scared me. I don’t know what set her off.”
Laura’s hands pawed frantically at the air, signaling him. He helped Julia onto the settee and went to her.
“Wanted to feel bumps on her head,” she wrote. “But ear―”
“You scared Julia. Like animal.”
“She can hear you,” she spelled with effort, and then Doctor understood. Through that sweet little maze Laura knew that Julia was able to hear, to let in the whole world, and most of all, his laughs and sighs. Nevertheless, he could not let her go unpunished. Julia was shaking, and this set-to would make the new arrangement of his world more onerous. Laura had slapped Miss Swift or one of the students many times, but never a guest, much less his beloved. She had grown accustomed, no doubt too accustomed, to asking for forgiveness from both the persons she had harmed and from God. Her friends always forgave her, and so too did God, but He absolved her only on the occasions when she was truly sorry. Doctor could tell from the set of her jaw that this was not yet one of those occasions.
He explained to Julia that Laura had only wanted to feel her bumps, and Julia seemed relieved, but when he asked if Laura could write her an apology, his fiancée quickly demurred and left the room. Laura sat in her chair, rocking back and forth, one finger bending the soft, pliable rim of her ear up and down, up and down.
Doctor was more comfortable in his dear Sumner’s apartments than he was with the run of all five floors of Perkins. There he was the Doctor, the Director, while here he was just a man, a friend, a listener, a talker, maker of no decisions, bearer of no consequences. Sumner’s landlady had installed precisely the right number of fat cushions for lounging, eight slung along the back of the divan. They didn’t fall asleep in his rooms; they never fell asleep, even after six courses and too much sherry at Martin’s with Felton and the gang. They always talked all night. Doctor had surrounded himself with women and children, of his own free will, but most days it was a hard bargain. He’d had the war, the wind, even the jail cell in Prussia, and now his most heroic act was guiding blind girls on horses down the beach.
Sumner poured them snifters from his finest decanter of brandy and lifted his glass in a mock toast. “Did you hear, Chev? Dickens’s American Notes sold out the first print run in England in two days. You and Laura are all of chapter 4—got it in a letter from Robesey.”
“And we come off well? Boz assured me the portrait would be favorable.”
“Boz, is it? Didn’t realize you were that close to the great scribbler.” Sumner scattered the papers on his secretary, and a pile of law books tumbled to the rug. “It’s here somewhere.”
“You need a good wife or a better maid.”
“We’ll see if you end up with either,” he said. “Here it is―‘Paragon of Noble Usefulness,’ that’s what Dickens calls you, Robesey says. Do you feel like a paragon?”
“Yes, I do.”
“And noble? And useful?”
“Yes and yes.” It was true. “He’s summed me up.”
“Dickens is good for that. The book should be here in a few weeks.”
“In time to impress the Astors at the wedding, I hope.”
“The Examiner claims that you’ve stolen one of ‘the three Graces of Bond Street,’” Sumner said. “It is madness, you’re right, but the best kind, I suppose.”
“Now, Charlie, Julia swears that I love you more than I will ever love her, but then I remind her that you were the one who brought us together.”
“Yes, the ‘rider on the black steed,’ as Diva Julia has immortalized you in her girlish verse. And I am the dun-colored horse left grazing. I would whip myself if I weren’t so tired.”
“You were never dun-colored in your colorful life.”
“If only I hadn’t brought Julia and her sister to view the inimitable Laura Bridgman. It’s actually Laura’s fault, you know, because you’ve made her such a showpiece.”
“She has been my own God-given, personal tabula rasa—how could I resist?”
“But with Julia, the slate is so full you’ll be lucky to find room to sign your name. At the bottom.”
“She’s keeping the Ward—she’ll be Julia Ward Howe—I made the deal with her brother in exchange for another thousand a year.”
“Do you think, Chevie, that I’ll ever be so blessed?”
“Of course,” Doctor told him. “Maybe even snare one of the other Graces.” But he didn’t think Charlie would ever marry; he thought less of women, and more of men, than even Doctor did.
“Do you know what your fiancée said to me that night after I first introduced you—she said, ‘Sumner, you and Dr. Howe are both so high-minded I’m surprised you can wear hats.’”
My darling Chevie,
If I have come to know you at all—and we are certainly doomed if I have not—I’d wager you don’t want to hear all the gallivanting we’ve been up to with the ceremony details. So suffice it to say that I’ll be exquisitely bedecked, as will the premises. All that remains of your duty is to ride that black steed to New York, or to poke along in a carriage with young goats Sumner, Felton, and Longo.
Your dear sister will, as we discussed, serve me at the wedding with my three sisters, but my family feels strongly that we cannot allow little Laura to be a member of our party. I pleaded, you know I did, Chev, but Brother Sam was quite resolute: if the Astors were gracious enough to host our wedding, we could not possibly repay them in such august society with the kind of interruptions the poor child would surely make. If my father were still alive to handle my dowry, things would not go so rough, but Sam feels he must act my fierce champion, especially since he settled with you on the house. And have you considered the glass eyes for her?
So please, darling, do forgive me on this one tiny point. I know you will.
Your soon-to-be-obedient―
Doctor folded the letter carefully in quarters, then in eighths, and finally into the smallest diamond he could make it, and thrust it into his waistcoat pocket. He was charged with the greatest philosophical and religious experiment of the century, and this was what his future wife saw—a mere nuisance? His blood was boiling to the consistency of molasses, and he knew he had to let it cool before he could even think straight.
After an agonizing week, he penned a note to Miss Swift instructing her not to tell Laura about the wedding until the day after he’d left for New York. He arranged for Laura and Oliver a tour of the Cunard steamer docked in Boston Harbor that he and Julia would be taking to England for their honeymoon. More than that he could not think about and stay sane. His life was changing, and he couldn’t let this child—his feelings for this beloved child who wasn’t even his—hold him back, paragon of noble usefulness or not. He’d have his own children, and Laura would too. No, she probably wouldn’t, unless some violence was done, but she would have her own life. Perhaps. He had boarded her and fed her and taught her language and would continue in his loyalty, albeit with a fractured heart. What more could God expect of him?
Excerpted from What Is Visible by Kimberly Elkins, published by Grand Central Publishing. Copyright © 2014 Kimberly Elkins.
