Helen Hath No Fury (6 page)

It was also quite sad, because here we were, women who’d missed signs of imminent suicide, who hadn’t a clue as to why Helen jumped, convincing ourselves we could produce meaningful memories Gretchen could use to help define her mother, a woman we obviously hadn’t known at all.

L
IKE MAKING THE SCATTERED PIECES OF A JIGSAW
puzzle fit, we were to fuse a portrait of Helen for her daughter, for her daughter’s future. We had preliminary discussions about abiding by very un-book-club-like behavior, such as speaking in turn. We tested and retested the tape recorder, found it fine, made a large pot of coffee, and did everything possible to delay a project we were set on even though we knew it was futile.

“Might I go first?” Denise pointed at her watch face.

I suspect that most if not all the women were as delighted as I to have somebody take the lead and give this amorphous project a shape and direction.

Denise did so with her usual calm self-confidence. She identified herself to the tape and spoke softly. “I only knew Helen through the book group, so what most impressed me was what she had to say about life through the books we read. More than anything, I’ll remember her values, her ethical sense. She looked for the moral underpinnings of the story, to see if they were sound. I didn’t always agree 100 percent, but I respected her for her fine values.”

Denise sounded ready to launch into one of her husband’s campaign speeches about morality. Next we’d get to family values and how Helen exemplified them, even though Helen had been last seen ranting against men
telling women what to do with their lives. But I caught my knee in midjerk and realized that Denise was right. Helen always looked below the plot for the underlying ethics and meaning. That’s what had gotten to her about
The Awakening.
Helen was a firebrand, crusading for causes she felt were in the right and looking for reflections of them in everything, on the page or off.

Denise smiled, said that was about it, and left to rejoin her husband’s campaign.

“Two things for starters,” Roxanne said next. “First, Helen was a good friend. I don’t just mean to me.” She leaned closer to the tape. “I mean to whomever she was a friend. You could rely on her. You could trust her. You could have fun with her or be serious with her. That’s pretty special and much rarer than it should be.” Roxanne’s sweet little-girl voice felt just right at that moment, soothing and kind. “And second, I want to describe meeting your mother for the first time,” she continued. “She looked like she had a lamp inside her—she gave out light from some invisible source. That sounds crazy, but it was true. Every boy’s eyes were on her and that radiance that night, and, Gretchen, when I look at you, I see that light turning itself on, too.”

That was kind and selfless, given that Roxanne had been Ivan Coulter’s college love, dumped after he met the shining Helen. Of course, that was long ago. Nowadays, Roxanne was married to an oil-company engineer and was the Coulters’ neighbor and friend.

“Of course, Gretchen,” Clary began with no ceremony, “you know how close I was with your mom. Maybe too close to describe her. At first, in college, I was almost put off by her. She was so pretty, so smart, and so popular. Everybody loved her, and she dated half the campus. We once joked about her having dated every Tom, Dick, and Harry—except it wasn’t a joke. She was
madly in love with a Harry right then. I didn’t know who it was, but I was sure he existed because I did personally know guys she’d dated named Tom Lester and Tom Peters and Tom O’Hara, and Dick Burton and Dick—you probably catch my drift. I think it was literally true.

“So there’s that. But so much more that I can’t describe—can’t even see clearly. Like when you look too closely at a newspaper photo and all you see are the dots that make it up, not what the picture’s of? She’s too complicated and maybe we have too long a history and it’d take too long for this tape, for sure.” Clary snapped off the tape and blew her nose and wiped at her eyes. She sat blinking and inhaling for a brief while, her finger held up as a signal she’d begin again soon. Finally, she cleared her throat and started the tape again. “We’ve been through rough times and good times. But what comes to my mind first was how decent a person she was, how good-hearted. Sometimes I guess I thought of her—and maybe you did, too—as being a worrywart or even sometimes as, well, a meddler. But it was concern that did it, a sense of fairness, a desire to make things right. I don’t want this to sound too goody-goody, because it wasn’t, necessarily. That trait didn’t always work well for making business decisions, but—” Clary inhaled and seemed to be choosing her words carefully. “—it was a good way to be a human being.” And Clary, whose motions were always quick, stood up, said “Gotta run, sorry,” and was gone.

“Listen, Gretchen,” Tess said into the tape, “your mother’s beginning to sound too much like a plaster saint and just a bit unbelievable, so I want to say that while everything everybody else said is true, she could be a real pain in the butt, too. She was human is what I’m saying. Which means that if you’re beginning to think that we’re all making stuff up that sounds good—now you know that isn’t true. Believe what we say.

“For me, I’ve seen your mother sad and upset and angry, but my personal mental photo, if you asked for one, would be of her laughing. Lots of times, lots of laughing. I remember when you were born, and, oh, how she’d laugh with pure joy just because you existed. So I think I’d add that to the picture of her, plus bravery. There were lots of times she stuck her neck out, when she believed in a cause and went for it. Do you remember her marching against the Gulf War—when she turned out to be the only person who showed up? Well, it was the wrong day, in fact, but march on she did. And then laughed at herself, too. That’s what I hold on to and you should, too, no matter what.” Tess sighed heavily, then grimaced.

I nodded to show that I’d cut that sorrowful sigh out, but I was controlling a sigh of my own. Her “no matter what” meant she accepted the idea that Helen had committed suicide.

“I admire your mother’s spunk.” Wendy Loeb had a self-assured, warm tone. As she spoke, she fiddled with the impressive engagement ring she’d worn for a decade. “She had guts. I met her years ago, through Ivan. The three of us were a partnership. We were going to build apartments in Devon and get stinking rich. But the project went kerplooey, and we got really poor instead, and in debt, and that might have scared off most women from high-risk projects, but not Helen. She paired up with Clary and wound up making another risky business work. And I found my footing again, too, and it all has a happy ending.” She stopped and put her hand to her mouth, eyes wide. I put my hands up to express, I hoped, that it was all right. An understandable slip of the tongue that no one would take to mean Helen’s death was a happy ending.

But she shook her head and said, “Turn it off,” and
when we did, she was crying. “Erase that. It sounds horrible, it sounds as if I thought—you know how it sounds. Just because we had that awful time with the project—Helen blew it, if you must know, and it set me back years. But then, look, things turned out economically for all of us, including Helen most of all, but that makes me sound … and it’s all water under the bridge. It’s the past; it’s forgotten.” She puffed out a hard exhale, then nodded. I turned the machine back on.

“I meant she had guts, like I said. In the best way. The courage of her convictions. Standing up for what she believed. Trust me, business partnerships that go sour aren’t the best way to stay friends, but because of who she was and how she was, we did. I admired her, and I learned from her.”

When it was my turn, I realized that I’d known Helen less than anyone else, having been with her only a dozen times, a year’s worth of book club meetings. I said how smart I thought she was, and how thoughtful. “Maybe everybody else takes that for granted, because they knew her better than I did, but that’s what stood out for me. I always wanted to hear what she had to say because it was always thoughtful and heartfelt and that’s a pretty fine combination.” Something like that.

Then, as if we’d primed the pump, people started remembering more, funny or moving anecdotes, and the tape went on until suddenly Louisa, who’d been silent the entire time, leaned forward and in a tense, flat voice, said, “Your mother was civic minded. That sounds … I know how that sounds, but everybody else has said all the other things, anyway. But I mean she cared about a lot of things that weren’t just about her. The, ah, community. And—and I’m sure that she always did what she thought was best, no matter how it looked.”

For a second, I thought she was offering consolation
for the suicide, but then I regained my senses. This was Louisa, and Louisa’s only topic was Louisa. She meant Helen’s possible role in not admitting Louisa’s child to the nursery school. This was Louisa being generous of spirit.

Roxanne piped in again. “I liked the way she was always looking forward. A kind of innate optimism. And she was interesting. We had an appointment we never got to keep, for a story she wanted me to sell. Something about her business, but—and this is a confession—Gretchen, generally I don’t find business, her business, all that interesting—but I knew she’d make the story interesting. She had that kind of a personality.”

We took a break so that everybody could think about whether there was more to add.

“When were you supposed to meet with Helen?” I asked Roxanne.

“Yesterday. Five o’clock.” Roxanne shrugged.

“She made an appointment.” Susan spoke softly. “Isn’t that odd?”

Roxanne looked confused by the comment. “Not really. We had the appointment for a few days. We were both at a party, and she asked me. I thought it was probably about her new program, which, to tell you the truth, was going to be next to impossible to get any space for in the paper. It’s not that unique, but of course, we all think our stories are earth-shattering. She was wired about it. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings.”

“What was it about?” I asked.

“I think it was the internship program they’re starting. She said, ‘An announcement,’ so it had to be something new. Look, I don’t want to say anything bad about Helen, but the truth was, she acted like she was going to announce World War III. I like helping friends, but really… she didn’t need that kind of PR. She was a wholesaler, but
she didn’t get it. She had that manic energy sometimes. Said this ‘scoop’—I swear, she used that word—would help my career, but even though I knew it wouldn’t, what are you going to do? Anyway, it’s moot now.”

“It makes it more confusing.” Susan looked woeful. She searched each of our faces in turn, looking for something I don’t think she found. “Listen,” she said, “except for that note, there’s nothing that indicates depression or suicide.”

“Do you think it was really an accident?” I had shelved my suspicions as inappropriate. They had no solid base, and especially now, after hearing more about her, the idea of someone intentionally going after Helen seemed remote. But Susan had been looking peculiarly alert all evening, and I wondered. And I wondered what I’d do if she were the one who suggested foul play.

“Is it your professional opinion that it’s possible to hide depression that well,” she now asked Tess, “and then kill yourself like that?”

Tess nodded. “If she’d reached some inner calm—a decision that she was going to do that—then she might well appear pretty normal, as in fact she did.”

“But she was anything but calm. She was ranting about Edna’s suicide!” Susan said. “Not inner or outer calm.”

“Edna’s,” I said, thinking out loud. “Maybe that was different. She felt Edna should have fought her society, stood up against it. Helen was a woman who did that, so maybe she just couldn’t identify with Edna. Is that possible?”

This time, Tess sighed, lifted a shoulder, and said, “Anything’s possible. But as I recall, she called Edna’s suicide too easy.”

“Listen to us,” I said. “The only thing we’ve got, even now, even after putting together our impressions of
Helen, is confusion. A day ago, I’d have said I knew Helen. Not well, but I knew her. Not like Clary must have, or Roxanne, or maybe others of you, but what’s obvious now is that I didn’t know her at all, and I’m not getting the sense that anybody did. We saw her, we interacted, we shared opinions and bits and pieces of our lives, we ate her food and fed her ours, but nobody knew her.”

“She had Ivan,” Tess said. “He knew her. That’s what husbands are for.”

Ivan, I thought. Ivan, who’d been unaccountably not where he should have been. That wasn’t what husbands were for.

Susan was the one who said it, finally. “The only thing that makes sense of this, that puts together the contradictory evidence, is if she didn’t do this thing.”

“You mean not on purpose?” Tess said. “You mean that she had an accident. But still … why did she leave her office and go home then?”

“A contractor?” Roxanne suggested.

“He was at my house,” Tess said. “The entire crew was. Of all people, Helen knew that.”

“That’s what bothers me,” Susan said. “It doesn’t work as an accident if there’s no reason for her to have gone home. And it doesn’t work as a suicide either. The only thing that makes sense at all is that Helen Coulter was murdered.”

Dead silence.

“Okay,” I said softly. “I’ll be the one to dare ask. Where was Ivan? What’s going on?”

Apparently, no one knew. Clary probably did, but she’d gone.

Susan cocked her head in the direction of the bedroom. “His guys looking into this?”

I shook my head. “I think they assume it was accidental—or a suicide.”

“So should we!” Roxanne flung out her arms so that gauze fluttered. “This gives me the creeps. Why even think that way, Susan? This isn’t one of your mysteries, this is real life! Besides, who are we? There’s nothing we could do about it anyway, so why even think such an awful thing?”

“Because even if we didn’t really know her, we know her better than the police do,” Susan said.

Louisa Traverso stood up. “What are you going to do, Susan?” she demanded. “Say your theory on the tape?”

“Of course not!”

“Good! You had me worried!” Louisa grinned as if she’d made a joke. “Then the recording session’s over, right? I’m going home. No need to wash my dish, Mandy. I’ll put it in my shopping bag. I hope the kid likes the tape.”