In the summer of 1901 the great inventor Alexander Graham Bell received two visitors at his Nova Scotia vacation home, a retreat to which he periodically retired to escape lawsuits and exercise his interests in aeronautical kites. Both of Bell's visitors were Sullivans, both were children of Irish immigrants raised a few miles apart in County Cork, Ireland. It happened as well that both lived in rented accommodations in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Dana and Cambridge Streets, respectively. As far as I can tell from examination of their papers, they were entirely unacquainted.
The first of these was a young woman named Anne, or Anne Mansfield Sullivan, as she sometimes fancied herself after the whimsical fashion of the time for made-up names. For the past decade Doctor Bell had served as father substitute for this young woman. Fertilized with his wise advice, watered with small financial contributions, Anne had grown from a half-blind poorhouse orphan to a woman whose story could (and did) bring tears to the eyes of the queen of Greece. Bell had grown very fond of Anne. He believed that she possessed and extraordinary native genius for expression and communication, a talent rivalling in some ways his own theoretical and practical contributions to the subject. If Bell's talking machine allowed a child to speak to its mother across the Atlantic Ocean, it had been Annie who had devised, with no more than native instinct, a means of speaking to a human soul entombed securely forever in black silence. It was a feat surely beyond the powers of his clever coils and carbon granules. Bell sometimes wondered whether there wasn't something in the sadness of her story that gave her special powers. She was a vivacious though sometimes sharp witted girl, with a familiar dark streak in her. Scottish born, Bell knew those highland moods, their alternating blacks and luminescent yellowgreen tones, those bellicose compulsions and devotions. More than once he had risen to her defense when Anne's enemies, real and imaginary, had tried to crush her. He was glad for her company. "I would much prefer to have people despise me as they certainly would if they guessed how full of distrust and contempt my heart is towards my fellow beings," she once wrote to him "I want you to know just how detestable I am. I find people hateful and I hate them." But he had a way of calming her. With him, she would later write, she felt "released, important, communicative." In his presence "all the pent-up resentment within me went out." So it pleased him that she had enjoyed a glorious summer swimming and sunning on his houseboat, sailing the coastal bays, even visiting the great white fleet back in Halifax harbor from war with Spain. Though she was now thirty five, Bell understood how circumstances had secluded her from certain natural aspects of life, and he now sensed in her restless manner and her growing plumpness a vitality, a ripeness which if otherwise unexpressed could go bad on her. He felt she needed a man. But all of this would somehow have to be explained to Helen. Dear little Helen! Would she understand? The second of Bell's visitors was a Sullivan too, a student at Harvard Law School, in his mid-twenties, a cautious young fellow with cornflower-blue eyes and a formal manner that shielded a temperament inclined toward sensitivity. Mark Sullivan's walking tour through Newfoundland and Nova Scotia and visit with the famous inventor had been sponsored by Boston's conservative Evening Transcript. He had arrived at Bells' on September 5, 1901, a few weeks after Anne's departure, stayed with the Bells for a few days -- it was the week that President McKinley was assassinated -- then filed his story of the visit by mail. Boston readers found it in their Evening Transcript of October 12, 1901.
It seems curious that Sullivan mentions nowhere in his dispatch the Bells' previous visitor, Anne Sullivan, his namesake and Cambridge neighbor. Surely Bell had talked about her to the reporter. Surely the two Sullivans had passed on Brattle Street many times during those two or three years. Surely there was no mistaking the two women, Anne and Helen, in and around Harvard Square. But neither Sullivan's papers nor his notebooks or his autobiography or his oddly forgettable 6-volume history of the era, Our Times, ever mention the name Anne Sullivan. It is a curious omission because Mark Sullivan had a good nose for a story; here he had a good one indeed, for in the minds of many Americans, especially those who were still inclined toward a more spiritual or humanistic view of the world, a certain scene, repeated each morning at the front door of 76 Dana Street, was nothing short of a miracle. In comparison to Sullivan's other Transcript subjects -- the disappearance of the western buffalo or the sleazy doings in city pool halls -- this daily scene was a triumph of the human spirit over nature's indifference. Or at least it seemed that way to some Bostonians. And yet it is as if that scene, so memorable and easily accessible, has been cut from Sullivan's memory, in much the same way as so many pages have been razored from his notebooks. In much the same way as other Bostonians, those of the better sort, Mark Sullivan had come to ignore, even to dislike, Helen Keller and her teacher.
A pale October morning sun splashes over a young woman, her face a deft stroke of creamy pink, framed in gray, her green wool dress receding in the dark rich shadow of the doorway. Around her waist a dim scumble of lace. White, she thinks, unsure of the color. Pink is her favorite color, she remembers. The color of a baby's cheeks. Has she no right to a favorite color? To enjoy Mr. Sargent's portraits in the library? Just because she is blind?
Now in this pale autumnal sunlight Helen Keller's mind is fresh and softly impressionable. Later her head will be crammed with the jostle and tumble of Homer and Horace, Racine and Schiller and Spencer, debating, declaiming, expostulating in their native tongues. Her brain will ache by evening, trying to remember what they are saying, what her Harvard professors say about what they are saying... But just now in the clarity of the morning Helen Keller strains to detect -- in the musky smell of red and brown leaves wet on the street -- the scent of her own feelings. Aren't feelings like colors? Sometimes she thinks she can catch them, sometimes not. Often she wonders: are they real, are they just undigested bits of Racine? Or imitations of what teacher feels? Or John? But surely she must have her own feelings! Surely she is not a just a copy or extension of her teacher or anyone else. Surely beneath and within, there is a true Helen! Her professors, especially Doctor Copeland, encourage her to think that way. They tell her that she must express her own feelings! Oh, it is so difficult! But she must try.
Helen's feet feel water running through the pipes, the solid tread of Mrs. Crimmins clearing the spoons and egg cups from the table. It will be a few minutes before Anne comes, before they leave for the lecture hall. Time for a moment of literary composition. She feels the sun on her face; her mind struggles at it's tether, loosens, rises, soaring sweeping in the early summer breeze off Boston Harbor up away from the trudge of weary feet on dirty city streets, up now over the blue hills it is summer again, happy green summer, and below in the world she can see green fields that tumble and roll and climb in riotous gladness. Anne and John had liked that phrase. Now she had a new one to add to it. She would recite it to them tonight. It was about canoeing. She had worked it out in her head. They had been canoeing one evening on King Philips pond, at Wrentham: I cannot, it is true, see the moon climb up the sky behind the pines and steal softly across the heavens, making a shining path for us to follow; but I know she is there, and as I lie back among the pillows and put my hand in the water, I fancy that I feel the shimmer of her garments as she passes. Sometimes a daring little fish slips between my fingers, and often a pond-lily presses shyly against my hand...
That had lots of s's, like her description of sailing that summer in Nova Scotia Bay, those soothing wondrous hours we spent in the shadow of the great, silent, men-of-war. Teacher and John said that the s's were very nice; the ocean sounded a bit like that, soothing wondrous hours spent shadow silent That had a nice rhythm to it too, the words bobbing like boats in Halifax Harbor. How glorious it had been, sailing! One day there had been a big storm. Doctor Bell had kind hands and wonderful devices. He made a little boat for her. The boat was pulled by a kite. Someday Doctor Bell promised he would invent a kite that could lift a whole church full of people. But not the great battleship, Indiana, largest and finest of the fleet: how exciting that had been. Would it be proper to reuse that little description she had written in her letter to Nina, describing what she felt on board the great ship? That was a feeling. That wouldn't be plagiarism, would it, just because she had written it in a letter? Plagiarism was such a horrible thing. I touched the immense cannon, and felt the places where she had been pierced with shells. On their departure Doctor Bell had told her that Teacher might someday wish to marry. Helen feels Teacher's step approaching on the wood floor behind her; Anne's fingers brush her palm, lightly tickly tapping. Remember, they spell, you have a test this afternoon. The pressure from the fingers is harder on the word test. They don't allow teacher in the building when she takes her tests. That must hurt Teacher. As if they don't trust her. And something else to worry about, Anne continues to tap on her palm. This afternoon. Another newsman wanted to call on them. Should they see him? What a bother. That last one had been so dull, so stupid and so curious!
Helen remembers how Anne had made such fun of the poor man. And he never knew it! Teacher can be so wicked and so funny! Helen smiles now and the two women step into the street, leaving the warm smells of muffins and eggs for the sharp tingle of cold New England air, a whiff of acid from the factories, the ceaseless tramp of feet on the dirty streets. They walk down Dana Street, hand in hand.
@BIGCAP = That fall of 1901 Helen Keller was beginning her sophomore year at Radcliffe College. The two women, Helen and her teacher Anne, lived in a pleasant rented apartment two blocks off Harvard Square. It had been thirteen years since that afternoon in 1888 in Tuscumbia, Alabama when Anne, an unknown charity graduate of Boston's Perkins School, had thrust Helen's hands into the cool stream of water issuing from the Keller's well, and the little girl had suddenly understood the meaning of water.
For some time after the "miracle", Helen and Anne had lived public lives, adored by wealthy patrons in New York and Boston. But troubled times came with the new century; strikes and riots and Boston, the Athens of America, filling with drunken Irish and pistol-packing Italians and moneygrabbing Jews and not always kindly negroes, overwhelming in their teeming masses the patience and the family trusts and moral ideals of Boston's golden age. And then too for Helen there was another reason for declining support; her teacher Anne Sullivan; the woman's domineering and edgy belligerence. All of this topped of by that terrible Frost King business, a sad case of plagiarism. After that there had been efforts to separate the two of them, suggestions that Anne's influence on Helen was no longer all for the best. But Helen, increasingly fragile and nervous, had always resisted, and no one, not even her mother, had the heart to force the separation, Anne had stayed with her.
So it was on this bright morning in the autumn of 1901 that Helen, now 21 years of age, was accompanied, as she would be almost every day of her life for the next thirty-five years, by Anne Sullivan. Faintly notorious, half blind herself, Anne was a flawed bottle-glass lens through which sweet Helen "saw" Boston, basking in the gentle autumn of its best century, flustered at the dawn of a new economic and moral order.
Already proficient in Greek, Latin, French, and German, Helen was managing to keep up with her classmates. But she would later confess that behind the girlish cheerfulness that people had come to expect of her there was a growing sad emptiness, sometimes a souring temper, even, in her worst moments, a hint of viciousness. She wondered whether she wanted to forever plough these stony Puritan fields. Excellence, they called it. Sometimes, especially now as the long New England winter nights came on, she wanted to give it all up. Every word, every letter of each days' lectures and reading, Josiah Royce's neo-metaphysics, Werther's sorrows (written in that difficult old German script so difficult for Anne to read to her!) Moliere and Racine, Spencer's Faerie Queen, all those words, words, words that Boston so carefully draped over what it called feelings, must necessarily pass through the sensibilities of a half-blind Irish orphan girl, thence through the tips of her fingers to the palm of deaf-blind Helen. Six, even eight hours a day. Then too it seemed that neither Boston nor Radcliffe had much patience with Helen's handicaps. Harvard's President Eliot had never troubled to receive them. Radcliffe in its Victorian severity had made little effort to accommodate her special needs, especially during examinations, which in her case were double proctored. As if to suggest a special danger of cheating!
There was the perception that sweet golden-haired Helen, whose gay laughter and eager affection had once brightened the best salons, had fallen beneath her teacher's shadow. Perhaps it was only to be expected; they were a rough people, the Irish, at times almost a medieval pestilence, and it was commonly and at times darkly suspected that Anne Sullivan was a severe mistress, an Irish nun whose impatience and appetite for vengeance drove her to cruel domination of Helen. Anne had little enough respect for Harvard. She often seemed motivated by a blasphemous wish to make the blind Helen see better than the rest, and to prove it with a summa cum laude. It seemed that Anne Sullivan was moved more by a desire for revenge than by charity and goodness, and in thinking back over what they had created in rescuing Anne Sullivan from her dismal past some Bostonians thought with irony that no good deed went unpunished.
Born to be a sweet Southern belle, Helen too sometimes had her doubts about Teacher's grim program. Anne insisted that the work be done to perfection. Nor was it sufficient that Helen graduate with first honors. Helen should put her spare time to use. Let them say that Helen had no thoughts or feelings of her own. Anne -- and Helen, of course -- would show them otherwise. Helen's proper sphere would be the inner world, and Anne saw to it that she developed a controversial talent for expressing what was in it. So it was fitting, when the days' Greek and the philosophy was done, that Helen should work on writing a book, her autobiography. It would contain special emphasis on Teacher's role in the "miracle." Teacher set goals and assignments and enforced them with an iron will. "I find it a burden, not a pleasure, and at times I HATE it," Helen wrote of this added responsibility to Anne, to become a writer of the first rank.
Expertise was now called for. The two women were joined in the evenings by their neighbor, a sophisticated and threadbare young Harvard English instructor named John Macy. During that fall of 1901 Macy had begun to help them compile some of Helen's undergraduate writing exercises into an extended narration of her life. The collection would appear serialized in Curtis Bok's Ladies Home Journal. the following spring, and be issued as a book the summer of 1902. The title would be The Story of My Life, and for the rest of the century it would be recognized as a classic 20th century American autobiography, with its centerpiece scene in which Anne helps Helen discover the meaning of "water". Anne recognized how it improved with retelling. It was an enduring scene exalting the power of language, and it continues to fascinate. In the 1920s the two women, short of money, would make it into a stage act, touring the country with troupes of tap dancers and trained animals, Helen on the vaudeville stage shouting "water, water" under the gaze of her teacher. That same "water" scene would later became the subject of a celebrated play, William Gibson's The Miracle Worker and no less than three movies. The author Walker Percy once credited Anne's miracle as the starting point to his personal answer to the mysteries of life.
@BIGCAP = Consider the men, satellites to them. So if Boston's establishment had now abandoned this untamed, fiery, intertwined couple, Anne and Helen, they had found alternate resources. There is Alexander Graham Bell. Lurking now in the background his personal secretary John Hitz, bearded and eccentric, with whom Anne Sullivan has maintained a flirtatious correspondence for years.
To these we now add John Macy, handsome and brilliant, a Harvard scholar, class of 1899. Mark Sullivan would have known him as editor of both the Harvard Advocate and the Lampoon. Macy's family was from Nantucket, Yankee fishermen long grown lean with the decline of the whale oil markets. John's Harvard friends were cultivated and fashionable young sophisticates who had come of age during the nineties, the mauve decade. They were fond of talking of Beauty and Decay. They cultivated the thirteenth century over the twentieth. If Nature were to be undraped, they preferred it to be by their hands, and certainly not be before the gaze of Science.
Could it have been a matter of discriminating eccentricity that attracted John to this chunky Irish girl fifteen years older than he? Anne was a woman of formidable appetites, growing fat on her own rich cooking. She did not lack any of the "animal spirit" so admired by Professor Santayana. She loved to throw her thick body about, to make huge bonfires and ride wild horses and swim in the lake during thunderstorms. When she wasn't goading Helen she was inclined to drift into a tropical dreamworld. Just now she had a vague plan to go to Cuba, to be a nurse in the Spanish-American War. That fall of 1901 she and Macy and Helen were spending a good deal of time together. Some thought it odd, an expanded version of the famed "Boston marriage" of Helen and Anne. They were becoming, in the dry memory of Helen Howe's Boston memoir The Gentle Americans, "the most extraordinary prefabricated triangle in history."
John Macy knew he was in love. But whom did he love?
He later wrote of them: "Half of Rome believes that Annie Sullivan is just a governess and an interpreter, riding to fame on Helen's genius." The other half believed that Helen is only a puppet, "speaking and reading lines that are fed to her by Annie's genius." In later years John Macy would drink away the evenings brooding about Helen and Anne. There was something fascinating about the two women; something of the odd attraction of twins. Anne's eyes were badly damaged, she suffered when she read Goethe. Something deep and a little strange in John Macy found these things attractive. Anne's fingers dancing in Helen's palm. Anne's tart tongue wagging in Helen's honeyed mouth. Sweet Helen, difficult Anne! He called them Bill and Billy.
It seemed to him that he was in love with the wild and difficult Anne, for there was no doubt that he was caught in the spell of this fiery Irish girl, saucy, droll, alternatively buoyant and black. But then there was Helen, now she could lead him into a secret garden, sweet, southern, perfumed, dark, silent. Was he not in these explorations also winning the most intimate penetration of the dark sweet folds of Helen? At least one cynical Macy cousin thought so. John's professed love for Anne was regarded by the Macy's as "the reverse of petting the calf to get to the cow." It was really Helen that John wanted, they said.
But then, there were times that bland Helen seemed powered by Anne's fiery engine. Who else could write a letter like Anne?
@QUOTA = Dear Heart:
@QUOTA = I was very sorry to say good-by to you yesterday after the pleasant hours we spent together. The sense of being at home comes to me so deeply when I am near you that I am always a little shivery when you leave me, as if the spirit of death shut his wings over me, but the next moment the thought of your love brings a rush of life back into my heart.
@QUOTA = The house seemed very empty to me when I got home in spite of the fact that it held the dearest thing in all the world to me until a couple of months ago -- dear, dear Helen. The evening was very beautiful and I took Mrs. Ferreri and Helen out in the canoe. They talked and I thought. Later after everyone had gone to bed I went out onto the porch to say goodnight to the fragrant, beautiful world lying so quietly under the pines. There was only the sound of one bird talking in his sleep to break the stillness. The lake had lost the glow that earlier in the evening had made it look so alluring and looked white and peaceful in the twilight. Somehow, I feel out of sympathy with the calm loveliness of the night. My heart was hot and impatient. Impatient because the repression and self-effacement of a lifetime -- and my life seems a century long as I look back upon it -- have still not stilled its passionate unrest.
@QUOTA = I sat a long time trying to find a reason for your love for me. How wonderful it is! And how impossible to understand! Love is the very essence of life itself. Reason has nothing to do with it! It is above all things and stronger! For one long moment I gave myself up to the supremest happiness-- the certainty of a love so strong that fate had no dominion over it and in that moment all the shadows of life became beautiful realities.
@QUOTA = Then I groped and stumbles my way back to earth again -- the dreary flat earth where real things are seldom beautiful.
@QUOTA = Dearest -- this is the first letter I have written to you and I am afraid I have said things in it that you will not like. You will say we have no right to test present happiness by harping on possible sorrow. It is because your love is so dear to me beyond all dreams of dearness that I rebel against the obstacles the years have built up between us. But you will not leave off loving me, will you -- not for a long time at least...
@QUOTA = I kiss you my own John and I love you, I love you, I love you
@QUOTA = Nan July 2, 1902<>
So in the end John asked Anne to marry him. Anne of course turned him down. There was a matter from the past that had not been worked out. There had been another man in the life of Anne Sullivan, and that man was now very much present and a even now he was a danger to Helen's book. So it now fell on John Macy to undertake the peculiar mission of seeking out the man who had first fallen under the charm of the woman who now claimed his love, had indeed been in a sense the author of the whole drama in which John Macy was now involved. If Anne was to marry John, he would first have to deal with this man. So it was that one day in 1902 John Macy boarded the trolley at Harvard Square. It was almost an hour's ride to South Boston in those days, and late in the morning he disembarked at the Perkins Institute. He had an appointment to see its director, Michael Agnagnos.