Helen Hath No Fury

CAUGHT DEAD IN PHILADELPHIA

PHILLY STAKES

I’D RATHER BE IN PHILADELPHIA

WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE …

HOW I SPENT MY SUMMER VACATION

IN THE DEAD OF SUMMER

THE MUMMERS’ CURSE

THE BLUEST BLOOD

ADAM AND EVIL

CAUGHT DEAD IN PHILADELPHIA
PHILLY STAKES
I’D RATHER BE IN PHILADELPHIA
WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE …
HOW I SPENT MY SUMMER VACATION
IN THE DEAD OF SUMMER
THE MUMMERS’ CURSE
THE BLUEST BLOOD
ADAM AND EVIL
HELEN HATH NO FURY
CLAIRE AND PRESENT DANGER

Special thanks to Marilyn Wallace, for invaluable and
instantaneous feedback when desperately needed; to
Dr. Ann Rivo, Evelyn Spritz, and Bert Strieb for doing
research that saved the day for me; and, as always, to
the best team a writer could have: Jean Naggar, my
agent, and Joe Blades, my editor.

“H
AVE SEX AND DIE.
” H
ELEN
C
OULTER BARELY PAUSED
for breath. “That’s what she’s saying.”

Helen’s words produced the heavy silence of a collective held breath. Etiquette had been breached. My book group had been discussing Kate Chopin’s
The Awakening.
More accurately, we’d been listening to another member discuss the research she’d done on the book and author when Helen charged in.

My teacher muscles twitched, ready to chastise Helen for interrupting. I reminded myself that this wasn’t a classroom, it was a living room, and its occupants, all ten of us, were adults.

Helen filled the lull she’d created. “I’m sick of that literary staple—dark-haired women who lust and die.” Helen tossed her own sleek cap of brown-black hair like one of those vixen heroines of old B movies. “Why was suicide her only option? Suicide is
cowardly
, too
easy.
She had her own house, her painting, friends like the piano teacher, her children—why do such a thing? No wonder the critics hated it.”

“Not because of that.” Denise was the one who’d been interrupted. “They considered it pornography.” Denise had a sheaf of printouts on her lap, and although she was being polite about being interrupted and misrepresented, she kept smoothing her skirt in a compulsive manner
that suggested how much she wanted to do the same thing to the discussion.

“Well, it makes
this
critic sick, too,” Helen said. “Maybe a woman wrote it, but she’s echoing all the men through history who decided that if a woman steps across
their
line in the sand—sexually—she has to be punished.”

At this, Denise stopped pressing her skirt and sat up, on alert, sensing a slur on her husband, Roy Stanton Harris, state legislator, candidate for Congress, and energetic advocate of “family values.” In my family, values meant really good buys—low rates for strip steak or telephone calls—but it didn’t mean that to him.

Denise was a fairly recent bride. She’d retained her maiden and professional name since marrying Roy Stanton, as she always referred to him, but she’d merged identity and opinions with him and had become the perfect political wife.

“Sorry,” Helen said, not sounding at all sorry. “But that’s how I feel. Sick and tired of men telling women what to do with their bodies.”

Denise looked on the verge of snapping back, but only for the smallest interval. And then her composed expression returned. “Could we talk about the book? About Kate Chopin’s book?” she asked quietly. “About Edna Pontellier and her world?”

In response, a chorus of voices. After a year in the group, I’ve given up wishing we’d be coherent or stay on track. We’ve twice voted down the idea of a formal leader, and instead take turns leading sessions. We are noisy and opinionated, sometimes chaotic, but I appreciate the emotion that’s behind the clamor. A love of books propelled me into teaching, then made the job frustrating, because I can so seldom transfer my passion for words and stories to my students. So it was a treat to gather with literate women to whom ideas mattered, women who savored books the
way they might fine meals. Or savaged them if they found them rancid, because their quality mattered to them.

“Don’t blondes also lust and die?” Clary Oliver asked. She was Helen’s business partner and best friend, and together, they produced high-end children’s clothing. Now she adopted a challenging stance and raised her eyebrows. “Hath not a blonde a sex drive?” she asked. Her own head sported a unique and expensive shade of beige.

Her sister and shadow, Louisa, also blonde, laughed with a harsh “Ha!” that I was sure was supposed to convey lots of meaning, but Louisa’s meanings were generally not worth figuring out.

“Sorry, Clary,” Helen told her partner, “but think about those famous sex-and-suicide girls—Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, and Edna, too. Not a single blonde.”

Susan Hileman, whose red hair and freckles could have been borrowed from Raggedy Ann, spoke up. “I read somewhere it goes back to the blonde Anglo-Saxons. The invading barbarians, the baddies, were dark, and we all know wild, sexy women are bad, right? So they’re dark, too. Angels and babies are blonde, the pure and the innocent, unless the woman’s a platinum blonde—an obvious fake, and thereby corrupt.”

Susan had been a lit major with me at Penn, and a year ago was my conduit into this long-established book group. She worked for a PR firm, tweaking images. But that was, she insisted, only her day job. Her true calling was as a writer, and she had a mystery in progress.

There had been several earlier mysteries in progress. I wasn’t sure she’d ever finished any of them.

“Renegade blondes,” she continued, “the obviously bleached kind—they drive a
man
to his destruction by making him kill for her. Except for Marilyn Monroe, who was perfect, because she was bleached but squooshy. Corrupt, but compliant.” Susan pointed at her springy
red curls. “As for me, my literary or film role is doomed to be as the sexless best friend.”

I wondered if there really was a pattern, and where my own brown hair—I like to think of it as chestnut, but really, it depends on the light—fit into the spectrum. Undoubtedly not in the province of heroines, and not even of sexy villainesses, more’s the pity.

“Edna killed herself,” Tess said, quietly pulling us back to the subject at hand. “Drowning was certainly not her only option.” Tess was a psychologist with short no-nonsense brown hair. I just knew there weren’t any myths about the two of us.

“Do you think society killed Edna?” I asked. “In the sense that it had no place for her. She had two affairs. She didn’t much care about her kids. She no longer fit anywhere.”

“Thank God times have changed,” someone softly commented.

“Nothing’s that changed,” Helen said. “Because of the Ednas. Edna could have stood up for herself, lived a Bohemian life, defied them, but she didn’t. That’s the same today. Most people won’t take a stand—a stand that might put them in a bad light.”

“It was harder then.” The incongruously babyish voice belonged to Helen’s neighbor, Roxanne Parisi. Roxanne struck me as a woman reinventing herself, at least outwardly. Her current image seemed costumed rather than dressed, in gauzy layers and noisy jewelry, and all of it topped by hair dyed the color of fine Bordeaux. But her voice seemed left over from an earlier incarnation.

“It’s hard now,” Helen said. “Hard to take a stand. Be defiant.”

“Don’t you just love the ruined woman!” Susan said with her customary verve.
“Ruined!
As if we’re pill bottles
with warnings: Do not use if seal is broken—contents may have been tampered with.”

“How come you can’t ruin a man?” somebody muttered.

“Can we get back to this book?” Poor Denise. She had assiduously prepared for the evening, and here we were, being especially unruly.

“What about her children?” Helen demanded. “Didn’t she have an obligation to them?”

“She didn’t really like them all that much.”

“The art! Everybody’s forgetting the art and the piano teacher—Madame—what’s her name?—remember how independent—”

“The book’s a hundred years old—you have to remember the cultural context—Victorian, for God’s sake—against which—”

“That’s right—why aren’t we looking at her as a woman of her times and her specific world?”

We were into the verbal free-for-alls that drove us crazy but never stopped.

“After all, the book was banned, libraries wouldn’t take it, Chopin never published another book—”

“I guess the book is relevant,” Helen said. “Because it’s so pathetically predictable. Women having sex voluntarily. Men deciding what to do about it. And one hundred years later, nothing’s changed except the language of it.”

The chorus swelled, disagreeing, agreeing, addressing the group, herself, the woman next to her, as many verdicts as voices.

“What about her affairs?” Clary asked. “Aren’t they relevant? What about her morality? Does everybody here think what she did is all right?”

“You’re right—the book’s about marriage, isn’t it? About how oppressive and confining it is.”

“Was.”

“Hah!”

Half the time, the married members proselytized for marriage. One of us was a young widow, two were divorced—one who’d already run through three husbands, another two—and yet another had been engaged for ten years. And then there was me. I. Amanda Pepper, spinster teacher. I didn’t have an ex and I didn’t have long-term commitments with the man I lived with. I was therefore the focus of their missionary zeal. As if my mother had trained them.

They never seemed to notice that when they weren’t touting that hallowed institution, they were trashing it, but I did.

“Wouldn’t you have an affair if you were married to that man?”

“The book’s called
The Awakening
, after all—”

“I think it means more than sexual awakening. I think it means—”

In the din, the only voices we could hear were our own. It was one of those moments when you don’t want the male of the species to happen by our “discussion” and have his every disgusting macho prejudice confirmed.

But no man was likely to stroll by. Helen’s husband, Ivan, was out of town, in Cleveland, foraging for shopping centers, parking lots, and office buildings. I don’t completely understand what he does, but I do understand that it’s lucrative, as witness the house he and Helen had been renovating for nearly a year.

Philadelphia’s Delancey Street where Helen lived is interesting. The blocks alternate between large homes and huge homes. It’s said that originally one block was for the wealthy, the next, meant to house their servants. I’m not sure that’s completely true, but Helen’s house was definitely of the lord-of-the-manor variation with four
stories of spacious high-ceilinged rooms, plus a solarium and roof garden currently being installed as a finishing touch. I wondered if the small family of three ever crossed paths in the enormous house.

Earlier, we’d toured the renovations, oohed and aahed over the new fireplace in the master bedroom, the Jacuzzi tub, the supersleek and expanded kitchen, the brick patio behind the house, the enlarged rear window, the skylighted bathroom. We’d even done anticipatory oohing at the potential roof garden, at the chicken-wire fencing, the bags of dirt, and stacks of bricks. I could imagine the solarium, the flower garden, the bricks turned into a privacy wall. It was going to be magical up there on a summer’s night.

“She was a baby-making ornament.” The voice brought me back to the living room and poor drowned dark-haired Edna Pontellier.

“Think that’s so different from half the marriages you know today? She was an early trophy wife, is all.”

Nobody looked at Denise, who was our closest thing to a trophy wife. She was twenty years younger than Roy Stanton and quite beautiful. But I had a sense that her ambition was as fierce and powerful as his. Maybe he was the trophy.

“What about my question?” Clary asked. “Having an affair doesn’t change anything.”

“Except the quality of the sex. That’s not chopped liver.”

“See—here—I’ll find it, I’m sure.” Susan shook her red curls and flipped pages, then put the book back down. “I mean, Mademoiselle Reisz is part of what ‘awakens’ Edna. The piano music makes her aware of passion and beauty. I wanted her to continue with her art, be like Mademoiselle Reisz, an interesting outsider.”

“She would have been ostracized!”

Good books are like Rorschach tests. What each person finds on the page depends on what she’s brought along with her. I know very little about the daily lives of these women. I see most only once a month, but I feel as if I know more about their values and concerns, more of what matters to them and who they are, than I do about many of my longtime friends. All of that is via the books we read, the ideas that fill our monthly meetings.

Think about it: we were ten adults squabbling about a woman who lived—fictionally—a century ago, in a vastly different culture. It was delicious. It was fun. It was amazing that we could care that much about Edna’s suicide and what led to it.

I’d once had a student whose mother was Vietnamese, a woman who spent her childhood trying to survive, not perusing Western classics. She’d married a U.S. soldier and moved to Philadelphia with him, and now, she was catching up on U.S. culture via her children’s assignments. So when her daughter’s class read
Romeo and Juliet
, so did she. And she was heartbroken by its ending, had expected, her daughter told me, that “they would work things out and move to a nice house in the suburbs.”

But the women in this luxurious living room were not immigrants who’d never before seen works of Western literature. And in truth, we weren’t arguing about Edna’s decision to drown herself or Kate Chopin’s writing style or about Victorian social systems, no matter the words whirling around the room. We were talking about our systems of belief, our confusions, and our blind spots.

We munched away as the discussion went on. Helen was an exemplary hostess. Tonight, even while she spoke, she simultaneously refilled wine glasses and passed platters holding cheeses, miniature calzone, and fruit.

Someone once again mentioned Edna’s suicide, and once again, Helen exploded. Something was gnawing at
her tonight. Maybe it was the stress of remodeling for more than half a year. “Suicide was a cop-out!” she said. “A way for Chopin to end the book. But it’s stupid. If you’re going to die—literally or metaphorically—might as well go down in flames, not do yourself in. Stand up for something—
fight
for something.”

“Fight for what?”

“What she believed in. What she wanted! Confront the hypocrites. Do something for change! Then she could have
left
if she was so unhappy. Gone off the way her lover did, to a new country where things are different. Or stayed and defied them all. Maybe even said hello to her kids once in a while.”

“Can we slow down, back up, and talk about the
book?”
Denise asked. “I have reviews and commentary.”

“We
are
talking about the book.” Helen surprised me with the chill that had entered her voice.