Helen Hath No Fury (5 page)

B
Y MORNING
, I
REMEMBERED
P
ETRA
.

There is nothing quite as miserable as going to school when you’re the teacher and you haven’t done your homework. When you haven’t kept your word. I wanted to hide at home rather than face Petra with nothing except sympathy and concern.

I assured myself that given the profound shocks of the preceding day, there had been no time, no reservoir of psychic energy to give over to my student’s problems. I reminded myself that I was human, that a friend had died violently the day before. I explored every guilt-assuaging alleyway I could imagine, but I still knew I was letting Petra—and therefore myself—down.

I slowly entered the building and made the obligatory stop at the office to empty my cubby of the daily directives and ads from textbook companies. Next to me, Shelly Traynor, who also taught English, read a message and sighed.

“What’s up?” I asked softly.

“Oh,” she said. “I didn’t mean to … it’s this note about Gretchen Coulter. She won’t be in for a while. Her mother … it’s awful. She—”

“I know.” Poor, poor Gretchen. I wondered if her father had surfaced yet.

“She has learning problems as it is, with the dyslexia.”
Shelly sighed again. “Turned off to school because of them, and I thought we were making real progress that she could hold on to over the summer, but now I don’t know what to do, how to help her.”

She wasn’t the only one grappling with those very words, and I couldn’t think of any instant solution that wouldn’t further intrude on Gretchen’s troubles. I shook my head sympathetically, wished her well, and trudged up to my room.

The closer the end of term comes, the more thoroughly I tend to plan out a week’s lessons. This is not done out of competency, but pure terror of what else might fill the yawning vacuum of summer-hungry adolescents. Luckily for me, the week was mostly in place, and nobody noticed—or at least commented upon—my robot-like behavior or the irony of teaching a unit on clear communication while I broke my silence with a mumble, and that, only now and then.

Yesterday, they’d each been given the picture of a complex quilting pattern and had written a description of what they saw. Today, their descriptions, minus the pictures, had been redistributed, and the class was trying to follow their classmates’ written directions. The results were entertaining and exotic patterns that had nothing to do with the originals. A lesson in miscommunication, but with good humor. There were occasional groans, but more often giggles.

Only a small part of my mind awaited the results of the exercise. The rest, most of it, was divided between Helen’s plunge from her roof and the thought of Petra arriving and finding me without answers.

My second-period class was also midway through a writing project. Theirs was called Abnormal Psychology. They’d recalled or invented vignettes of odd behavior, which they first described on paper and then for the
class. We had many raised eyebrows, laughs, and nods of recognition—every family has someone who’d qualify—but after a discussion yesterday, the class was moving on from thinking of these people as merely “weird.” Now, they were to describe the behavior and then “analyze” its causes. They were making up histories and situations for their characters, and they seemed fairly captivated by the process. Except, of course, when interrupted by the PA system.

This time, the urgent! flash! stop the presses! interrupt every single room in the building! message was that Littering Was Bad.

My jaw clenched painfully, but it took all that pressure to keep me from saying what I wished I could say about the interruptions.

Dr. Havermeyer and his mouthpiece Helga lacked all impulse control. He had a thought—littering is bad—and boom! He had to announce it to the world. In the head, out the mouth. He must have been a joy of a student.

Then it was time for Petra’s class. They arrived, but she did not. I stood in my doorway, hoping to see her race in, and fearing it at the same time.

While I stood there, a girl came to my classroom door and, with no expression on her face, scanned the room.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

She pressed her lips together, looked at me sideways, then tilted her head in an attitude of consideration, started to shake her head, stopped, and bit her bottom lip. I wondered how my last class would have described and analyzed her behavior.

“You’re Miss Pepper,” she said.

I already knew that.

“I’m Bonnie Kramer. Petra’s friend.”

“Do you expect her?”

She shrugged. “Not exactly. Well, I wish, actually, I
wish, but I thought she might be here, that’s why I came over, but—”

“She isn’t.”

Bonnie half turned. “Well, then, I guess I’d better be—”

“What’s going on?”

Bonnie looked at me appraisingly. “She told me that you know. That she talked to you. Told you. That you would help her.”

“Where is she? She promised not to do anything till we talked,” I said. “Please, tell me what’s going on.”

“I went there this morning, like always. I live around the corner, and she’s nearer the bus, so I always stop and ring the bell and we take the bus together, but this morning, Mrs. Yates answered the door and asked me why I was there. I didn’t know what she meant—I go there every day, and I said so. And Mrs. Yates goes, ‘She said she was sleeping at your house.’ And I realized I just made a real mess, so I tried to make it better. I said sure, she was at my house but she forgot her notebook, and could I get it. I couldn’t think of anything good.” Bonnie blinked back tears.

“It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not. She’s screaming, ‘That little bitch, where did she really go?’ and ‘I wonder how many other times she’s lied to us’ and on and on, and I made everything really bad. What’ll happen to her if she ever comes back, and if she doesn’t, then what’ll happen to her? Where would she live? What would she do?”

“Back up, could you? You spoke to her yesterday. You knew she’d spoken to me, right?”

Bonnie nodded. Inside the room, the herd had realized that nothing was stalking them. That in fact, I was rooted at the doorway, my attention elsewhere. And so they had begun gamboling in the meadow. “Excuse me,” I said. “Wait here. I’ll be a sec.”

“I have math now.”

“I’ll write a note. Please.”

It was my sad duty to put a damper on the merriment. I stood in front of them, my roll book and a notepad clutched against me, and I reinflicted Hester Prynne on them, an essay about which characters in the novel were or weren’t moral. And then I hurried back to Bonnie, one eye still on them as they moaned, groaned, and settled in to writing. It was all an interesting charade since I knew these papers weren’t going to count for much, if anything, and I also knew that they knew it. And, I suspected—they knew that I knew that they knew.

But with a collective sigh, we played our roles. “Now,” I said to Bonnie. “You were talking. In person? On the phone?”

“On the way home. And when she came over, we talked more.”

That seemed to constitute a full report for Bonnie. I prompted. “And? How was she? What was her mental state? Did you think she might run away? Did she say anything that would hint where she might have gone?”

Bonnie shook her head. “She told me about talking to you. She was sort of glad she had, and sort of sorry? I remember she said that. And she told me about questions you asked, and that she told you about her grandmother who is
awful
—I once went up there with her and her sister. She was afraid you were going to make her tell her parents.”

I didn’t know how to respond. I hadn’t even known what I’d say to Petra. I’d been so worried about saying the wrong thing. But this sudden flight had me stymied. Without doing a thing beyond offering to help her sort things out, I’d managed to make her more desperate. “Were you there? At that party?”

Bonnie’s eyes widened, and I got the feeling that she
thought if she made them large enough, they’d hide her confusion while she decided whether to tell me the truth or not. Finally, with another tightening of her lips—the girl was going to have purse strings around her mouth way before her time—she nodded. “But I didn’t … I don’t like to drink. I didn’t know what was going on with her until weeks later when she … found out.”

“Did you know the other people there? The … boy she was with?”

A head shake. I couldn’t tell if that was true.

“You have no idea where she’d go?”

Another head shake. “I can’t believe you can know somebody that well—my best friend! And then they disappear. Like you didn’t even know them at all.”

I thought about Helen, secretly suicidal, and I wondered how many times in life we had to keep learning and relearning the basic truth that everyone is a mystery.

“She wouldn’t go to her grandmother’s,” Bonnie said, “and her other grandparents live out in California so where would she go? I think she ran
away.
Just
away.”

I pictured the girl on the street, in a shelter. I pictured her in too many situations, all of them bad and bound to get worse. There are, in fact, fates worse than death. “She may get in touch with you,” I said. “And if she does, please tell her to come back, to—”

“But that’s it! I’ve ruined everything. Her parents know she didn’t sleep at my house. They know she lied. They’ll go nuts! I’d have to tell her, warn her, wouldn’t I? That her parents know and they’re furious—and if I told her—then she’d never, ever come back!” Bonnie’s eyes flooded and she shook her head, angrily. “I did the worst thing. I did just the worst thing,” she said. “All day long that’s all I can think about, what I did.”

“You stopped at her house. There’s nothing to berate yourself about. If she gets in touch, tell her to call me.”
The words came out of my mouth of their own volition. I hadn’t known I was going to say them. And once I had—and they took on supernatural quality, floating over to Bonnie who then looked at me through moist and suddenly adoring eyes, as if I possessed special wisdom, the ability to save, to heal the sick, and to work miracles—I was the one who felt sick. I was the one who thought I’d just done the worst thing.

Bonnie was too young and naive to ask what I’d do when and if Petra called. She simply accepted. I was about to fail two girls, instead of just one.

“Here,” I said, ripping a page from my notepad. “I’ll write you a late note for your math teacher. But take this, too—” And I wrote on a second sheet. “—my home phone.”

It shouldn’t be like this, was all I could think of as I watched Bonnie walk away. Nobody should have to run away from home. Nobody should have a home so terrifying and cold. Stone, they’d named her. Petra, stone. Maybe it was wishful thinking on their part, the hope that she’d be just like them.

O
UR IMMEDIATE IMPULSE HAD BEEN TO HUDDLE TOGETHER
, shield ourselves against the specter of Helen’s death. But twenty-four hours later, when the book club members emerged from the elevator into the loft, each hesitantly bearing a casserole or covered bowl, facial expressions and body language said, “Why are we doing this? What did we have in mind?”

With death instead of a book to discuss, we lost all our self-assurance. It was so much easier dealing from the intellect than from the heart, which has no language. We were sheepish and tongue-tied. Why we’d thought that by congregating we’d come up with the wisdom and comforts we craved, I don’t know. Through history, people have searched in vain for what to say about, what to make of death. Revelations weren’t likely to occur just because my group was grieving.

Judging by expressions and uncomfortable silences and the overfussing with the dishes they’d brought, I knew I wasn’t the only one feeling inadequate because I didn’t know what to say and do. In another culture, it would have been easier. We would have fallen upon each other and sobbed, wailed, keened. That used to seem primitive to me. I now recognized it as astoundingly pragmatic, perceptive, and wise.

Our awkwardness wasn’t only about Helen’s death or
Helen. It was also about how afraid we are to admit we’re afraid. For all our grown-up status, for all the things we do and all the roles we play in life, the knowledge that we aren’t in charge of a whole lot that’s important is terrifying—and not something we like to let out of the bag. So we smiled and put our collective sustenance on the table, where I’d set out plates and forks and napkins. And we eddied around, making small talk like people at a dreadful cocktail party.

The feeling persisted that I should do something, that I was the hostess—although that wasn’t exactly true. I was more the venue provider, which sounded so chilly and distant that it didn’t even serve as something I could tell myself for reassurance, so I hostessed up, urging everyone to help herself to food, and with heaping platters balanced on knees, we settled around the room on the borrowed folding chairs.

Mackenzie emerged from where he’d been holed up in the bedroom. “Won’t bother you ladies,” he said in his soft bayou-edged voice. “Wanted to express condolences. From all I heard, Helen was an impressive woman, and I’m sure everybody feels her loss and will for a long time.” He poured himself a glass of wine and, after much urging and waitressing by the group, amassed a plateful of offerings and retreated to the bedroom.

“He’s
gorgeous,”
Roxanne said the second the bedroom door shut. “And, oh, that Southern
accent.”
There was much agreement and further embellishments about his hunkiness and my luckiness.

I appreciated the sentiments, although I admit the hungry expressions on some of my dear friends’ faces worried me. I believe Louisa Traverso, she of the three failed marriages, actually drooled.

The accolades continued. I was glad the awkward silence had been broken, although I found this effusiveness
excessive. No need to be so very effusive in their praise, or to so lovingly catalogue his fine attributes.

They made him seem like a great purchase I’d made, a clever investment. Or an especially adorable pet.

And then, just as abruptly as it had begun, it ended, and the stilted silence returned. This time, it felt like shame in new attire. We weren’t supposed to be ogling a handsome man; we were supposed to be mourning, eulogizing, doing something about a dead friend.

“What we have just witnessed, ladies, is the life force in action,” Tess said, putting us back on course. “Isn’t it nice to know that despite how sad and rotten and upset we are about Helen, it hasn’t extinguished our pilot lights altogether? I say hooray for it.”

It is good to have a shrink around.

“I’m so upset,” Roxanne said, breaking the ice in which we’d set the dead woman. “And shocked. I’ve known her forever, but I must not have known her at all. That frightens me. I don’t know what it means.” She looked down at her fingernails, ticking one tip against the other. We waited. She made her tick, tick noises. Then she lifted her head again and spoke more forcibly. “I’m sorry, but she did not seem depressed Monday night.”

There was a round of murmurs, all agreeing. “Not depressed,” was repeated softly. “Not suicidal!” more loudly.

I was glad to hear my gut impressions seconded. Nobody had found Helen quite herself Monday, but nobody thought that a tirade against suicide dovetailed into committing suicide the next day. Nobody suggested that Helen had felt irresistibly drawn to replicate Edna’s actions.

My suspicions surfaced again, but this did not seem
the time to broach them, since nobody else was moving from disbelief toward what I thought was believable.

“But there was a note,” Tess said. “This is so difficult to absorb or believe, but then there’s the fact of the note.”

“She wasn’t depressed, but she wasn’t herself either on Monday,” Clary said. “She was so
jumpy!”
She stopped, her eyes growing first wide, and then overflowing. “I didn’t mean—how could I have said that word! I didn’t mean …” She shook her head and bent over to find tissue in her bag.

“Please,” Tess said. “It was just a word. And she did seem hyped up, overly upset about the book and Edna’s behavior.”

Clary cleared her throat and seemed to have almost regained her composure. “Listen, I meant to say … the truth is, I can only stay awhile,” she said. “Ivan’s devastated, and I promised I’d—”

So Helen’s husband was back. Clary didn’t offer an explanation for where he’d been and nobody asked. At least not out loud.

A polite cough broke the brief silence. “I can’t stay either,” Denise said. “I wanted to be a part of this, but in truth, I shouldn’t be here at all. I’m supposedly out in Villanova with Roy Stanton, but I said I’d be late. Zack’s at the helm.” As she said her stepson’s name, a fleeting frown, very fleeting—Denise seldom showed even slight displeasure—darkened her expression.

I was continually surprised by what a political animal she was. Being arm candy, a professional smiler for an ambitious man, sounds appalling to me. I hadn’t known her before her marriage, but people said she’d been strongly committed to women’s rights. Now, her expressed beliefs were cloned from her husband’s, so far to the right and so antifeminist that it was incredible she tolerated, let alone
embraced such notions. Apparently, she’d vowed to love, honor, and adopt his driving ambition as her own.

None of us, including Denise herself, talked much about Roy Stanton or his campaign in book group. One night a month, etiquette trumped politics.

“Zack’s very take-charge, very enthusiastic, but still, he’s new to it, and young. I shouldn’t stay long.” This time, Denise managed not to grimace as she said her stepson’s name.

I’m not sure I could have been as noncommittal about Zachary Harris.
Aimless
has become an old-fashioned word, but it described the obnoxious young man wandering through life with only the enormous chip on his shoulder as company. His mother had died right before he entered Philly Prep, and a whole lot of slack had been cut for the grieving child, so much that for six years, he used that slack as a hammock in which to sulkily doze away his days. And when he wasn’t aimless, he was aimed in the wrong direction, involved, I’d heard, in petty crime and unsavory pursuits.

But now, five years after high school, he’d turned around. He’d been infected by the same congressional lust as his father, for whose campaign he now worked. According to Denise, suddenly and completely, he’d found his place in life. Some discover religion. Others discover politics. Whatever works, works.

“What I meant,” Clary said, “was would everybody mind if we more or less … discussed whatever it is that we came for? I mean … Helen. Now?”

Her sister, Louisa, sat picking at her cuticles. Sooner or later she’d find a way to turn this into a this-is-all-about-me session, but for now, she was quiet, which was good for everything except her cuticles.

“How’s Gretchen?” Tess asked.

Clary shrugged. “Exactly as you’d assume—devastated,
stunned, bereft, needy—and afraid she provoked this. Apparently, she’d been nagging for some computer system—I’m not sure what. And Helen had really gotten mad. Told her that she had no idea how hard life was, and what a bad time they were going through. Gretchen didn’t know what Helen meant. I assured her that all marriages hit speed bumps, that things were tense at work, and that she, Gretchen, had nothing to do with what her mother chose to do.” Clary gulped, put her hands up, signaling that she was empty now, that she’d said all she knew, and her chin was out pugnaciously, as if daring us to contradict her, or to mention her glittering eyes.

I had a mental image of Gretchen, the child in pain, and saw her blur and be Petra, as well. It hurt even imagining what either of them was feeling. I redirected attention to Helen, not her child. Not anybody’s child. “Clary?” I asked. “How about you? You see her every day. Did you have any inkling she was suicidal? Did you see her that morning?”

Clary sighed. “I wasn’t there that morning. I had an appointment in Jersey. She was gone by the time I got back.” She frowned. “I mean she’d left the office.”

“Would it be horribly wrong to ask whether business problems could have overwhelmed her?” Denise leaned forward, earnest and worried.

I love questions like that. If it
was
horribly wrong to ask that, then how should we react? By shouting “yes!” and stomping out? Punishing her with silence or the dunking stool? The question was awkward, given that Helen’s business partner was not apt to reveal serious problems.

Clary obviously also felt stymied. She cocked her head, looked to the distance, and said only, “I can’t imagine why.”

A nonanswer.

When nobody followed up on that, Clary burst into tears. “Sorry,” she said. “Sorry. This isn’t like—I just can’t—”

My own eyes stung and I looked down, as well. The entire room grew quiet, but this time, it felt appropriate, like a meditation, a necessary one.

Clary sighed raggedly. Then she dabbed at her eyes and looked at Susan. “Know what? Helen was a fan of yours. In her book—the book that had the note also had a lot about your Polly Baker story.”

“Polly? Really?” Susan looked delighted.

Clary nodded. “Helen must really have loved it. I mean writing it down, wanting to remember it.”

“Speaking of writing things down,” Tess said. “I thought of something we could do, something that would be nice. I’m assuming we’re all concerned about Helen’s daughter, and that I’m not the only one who feels useless in a situation like this. Gretchen doesn’t know me well, and she’d be uncomfortable if I went to talk to her or spend time. But a letter might be different. My mother died when I was around Gretchen’s age, and a few of her friends wrote down their memories of her. It doesn’t sound like much, but there have been so many times I reread those letters….” She let the sentence dangle.

“Well, but—” Louisa was expert at objecting.

“I’ll find a pretty scrapbook,” Tess said, interrupting her. “We can put all the letters in it. Just write on one side of the page, is all. Whoever wants to—no obligations, but if you’re going to do it, do it as soon as possible. I think Gretchen could use immediate gestures of kindness.”

“What kind of things do you want in it?” Louisa sounded put-upon. “I’m not exactly a writer, you know.”

Tess was the calmest person I knew. I don’t know if this was part of her professional training, or if it came
naturally, but where others rush to fill silence and say anything—and by
others
, I mean myself, of course—Tess waited while you could almost hear her thinking. What I found amazing is that almost always, her listeners were patient and did not themselves rush in to fill that space. “An anecdote,” she now said. “An opinion, an appreciation, a thought about life, why you’ll miss her, a photo. Whatever good things her memory triggers in you. Gretchen’s an adolescent; she lives in another country. Someday she’ll want to know her mother better as a person. She’ll want to see her with adult eyes. That’s all—we share our perceptions.”

“I didn’t know her that well,” Louisa said. Louisa probably didn’t waste her mental storage space on good or happy memories. She needed all of it for her world-class collection of grievances. “I saw her once a month at book club. And at my sister’s social events. And felt her presence, because of the preschool board she was on.” She pursed her mouth, and to her probable dismay, nobody encouraged her to talk about the heartache of not getting her kid into the right preschool. I knew she wanted to begin a sentence with, “I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead, but—”

“Can we have the memories, the letters, in by the weekend?” I asked. “I’ll be glad to help out, Tess.”

“What do we do?”

I shrugged. “We should have a central collection point. It could be Tess—”

“We’re at the shore,” Tess said. “Have to get the house ready for summer. Replace the rusted and the rotting.” She smiled at the mess she implied she would find. “However,” she continued, “I could get the scrapbook and my letter here before we leave Friday, and if you wanted to, the whole shebang could be ready by Monday.”

“That’s when they’re talking about a memorial service,” Clary said. “If the body’s released by then, which it should be.”

Two people suddenly realized they were leaving town the next day and wouldn’t be able to get anything down on paper beforehand. It looked as if Tess’s idea was going to be stillborn.

“Wait a minute,” Louisa said. “Just one minute. Forget the book.”

“But—”

“Let’s say it. A collective memorial. Right now. All together. We don’t need a scrapbook. Do you have a tape recorder? We could get it all down—”

I was horrified to acknowledge that a decent idea had come out of Louisa.

“I know how to splice tape,” I said. “Edit it. My class did a sort of radio play, and I learned how. So say whatever you like. Revise, don’t be inhibited. We can always edit it out.”

This was a pleasant, well-meaning plan.