Helen Hath No Fury (8 page)

M
ACKENZIE SPRAWLED ON THE SOFA
, B
UZZ
B
ISSINGER’S
book about the city open on his lap. He marked his spot with a finger, looked up, and smiled. Permission to interrupt.

“Business must be slow,” I said, and then I remembered that he’d told me he’d be home early. I was on mental overload and forgetting basic things. “Good book?” I quickly added.

“Very, and how was your day?”

“It’s not one I’m going to press into my scrapbook.” I made tea for both of us and sat beside him. “It’s getting so that I don’t trust anybody.”

“Know the feelin’.”

I looked at him. I always enjoyed that. I liked where three and a half decades had etched lines. I liked the way his hair was prematurely salt and maturely pepper. If I’d designed him, I’d pretty much have come up with what was presented to me. It relaxed me to be with him, and I knew I could speak my mind. He felt like home.

I told him about the day, about Petra’s continued disappearance, and he was adequately distressed, though not at all hopeful of finding her until she wanted finding. And then I told him what Roxanne had said, and my concerns. Her. Helen. Ivan. Wendy.

He advised against basing theories on rumors and
gently reminded me that what seemed the case most often was the case. Things seldom were as convoluted as, perhaps, I was making Helen’s death out to be.

He never said murder was an impossibility, but neither did he encourage the idea. Still, he seemed troubled by the writing on the Dumpster and suggested I call the police to point it out, in case they’d missed it.

“You know,” he said, apropos of the rumors Roxanne had hoped to dispel, “the ladies of your book group make a pretty poor argument for marriage.”

Before I could even say “huh?” which is what
I’d
have said, my mother spoke. She was on a cruise, far away, but it was her voice I heard in my brain.
What is wrong with this man? Why is he so obsessively antimarriage? What does he have against it?

My mother was haunting me.

Or I was becoming my mother, which was a much more terrifying prospect.

“There are ten of you, right?” Mackenzie asked.

I nodded.

“All of an age to marry or to have married, correct again?”

I resented his need for verification.

“So Faith—the one who works at city hall?”

“I know who Faith is.”

“She’s a widow, and Wendy has been engaged since Queen Victoria was on the throne. Two more are divorced—Clary and Louisa, correct? And Louisa’s been married what, three times?”

I was impressed by his ability to remember those names and their marital status—and then, of course, I wondered why that data had registered so powerfully on him. And again, Mama boogied in, whispering this time, but a stage whisper, inescapable:
What is wrong with this man?

“Denise?”

I nodded. “Her first, his second. He was a widower.”

“Tess and Susan, also married. That’s it, correct?”

“Helen. She was married, or don’t you count her now that she’s dead?”

He looked surprised. “Testy, are you? Why?”

I did not choose to answer. If he’d listened really clearly, he would have heard my mother questioning his psychological stability. “You forgot me, too,” I said.

“Never.”

“You did. One more single.”

“Right.”

A totally unsatisfactory response. I thought he’d either compliment me on my liberated free self or make his meaning clear.

“Anyway,” he went on, “now you’re saying that Roxanne, one of the married ones, is probably messing with Helen’s husband.”

“Mackenzie, what is the point of these calculations?”

“Thinking about it, is all. I mean, does it frighten you seein’ Louisa with her three marriages and a kid from each? Or Clary? You told me they were bitter divorces.”

“I don’t see what relevance their lives and mistakes have with my choices.”

“Really?”

“Really!” I snapped.
This is not a normal, healthy set of questions
, my mother said.
The man is pathologically afraid of marriage. Or of something.
“Shut up,” I muttered.

“What?”

“Talking to myself.”

I
OFTEN DAYDREAM ABOUT A LIFE THAT’S LIKE A LINEAR
narrative. A story that moves from A to B without a detour, sidetrack, interruption, or distraction, that starts at the beginning and moves forward to a conclusion.

That sounds elegant and purposeful, clean and straightforward.

It might be boring, but there are long periods of time when boring sounds irresistible. I’d love the chance to try it out.

The next morning wasn’t my chance. Before I was out of bed, I felt consumed by sorrow. Petra and Helen had been with me all night, both asking for something I didn’t know how to provide.

And on a much more mundane level, nor did I know how to dress. I dragged myself out of bed, but overnight, the contents of my closet had turned to ill-fitting rags. My blue slacks, which would have been acceptable, were still at the cleaners, and my white linen blouse was missing a button, and I couldn’t make any other objects in my wardrobe coordinate.

My hair was having an even worse day than I was, and every spray and goop and pomade I applied only intensified its problems.

When I turned on the radio to get a weather forecast, I heard yet another ad for the overfunded jerk Roy Stanton talking about the good old days. I snapped it off.

I realized with dismay that I hadn’t finished—actually, I hadn’t even begun going over a homework assignment on found poems that should have been handed back today. I knew the class had enjoyed the project and some were quite proud of their work, but I’d wasted a lot of time the night before wondering if I was, indeed, turning into my mother.

Instead, I was turning into a failure at everything. At teaching, at dressing, and at being a human being, a friend, a helper.

I couldn’t even boost my energy, if not my spirits, with a cup of coffee. Our state-of-the-art coffeemaker went belly up with a blue shot of light and a stench that didn’t
change the downhill direction of the morning. It left a scorch mark on the butcher-block surface. I left home.

En route to school, the heavens sprung a leak. Were I a nineteenth-century poet, I might think they were sympathizing with my sad state. But I was a twentieth-century teacher without a raincoat, so I knew this was happening simply to spite me. Or perhaps, to further punish me.

Nothing improved with my arrival at Philly Prep. Before I entered the school, in the hundred feet or so outside the building, I had two confrontations with students, one of whom had made a bad situation worse, and the other of whom believed that I had done precisely the same thing.

Bonnie must have been waiting near where I always park my car, because I yelped as she all but leapt out at me. “I wanted to be sure and catch you!” she said.

“You’ve heard from Petra?” Maybe the day was looking up, then, despite the misty rain slowly soaking my hair.

She shook her head. “Ethan.”

Forgive me. I hadn’t had my daily infusion of caffeine. My head was still wet outside, but still half-asleep inside. I must have looked blank.

“You know, Petra’s … you know. The guy.”

“He got in touch with you?”

She nodded solemnly. She wore a slicker and a cute waterproof hat I envied. “Last night. He called from college. His mother gave him my number. So at first he was okay.” She shrugged. “Like he thought maybe I’d called him up to invite him somewhere. Then I said I was a friend of Petra Yates, did he know who she was, and he got weird. He knew who I meant.” That seemed the end of her tale, as far as she saw it.

“And?” A drizzlette dropped off my eyebrow. Bonnie
was frightened and needed contact, but that didn’t mean we had to do it in the rain.

She kept her eyes away from mine, looked slightly to the left of me, and when she spoke, her voice was hesitant and low. “He hollered at me. Said I was harassing him. Said he’d done all he was going to do about Petra. I said, Ha! I knew what he’d done and I knew what had happened because of what he’d done, and he said he was hanging up but that his father was a lawyer and he’d take legal action to stop me if I didn’t stop pestering him and calling his mother, and I said … I said …” And again, the head shaking and eyes everywhere on the horizon except at me.

“Said what?”

“He made me mad. I wasn’t pestering him or anything! I just thought maybe, maybe she’d called him, that he knew what she was doing, or something, that was all.”

I nodded, waiting. What could she have done?

“I told him she had disappeared and the police knew about it and they knew what he’d done because I’d given them his name and they suspected foul play.”

“Tell me you’re kidding.”

She wouldn’t look at me.

“It isn’t like that anymore,” I said. “People don’t kill girls just because they’re—”

“If they’re desperate, they could. If they have Petra’s parents and if they’re in college and this underage girl’s father would kill him … Okay. Maybe I shouldn’t have said it, but I was
mad.
I’m scared about her and he should have been, too. So I told him everybody knew she was dead and he was the prime suspect.”

I closed my eyes, as if that would erase what she was saying.

“I said he should expect official visitors. Soon.”

Only now did she look up at me. Her expression—a bit belatedly, thought I—was anxious.

I couldn’t think of what to say. Mostly I wanted to shake her, to ask why she’d behaved like an idiot, escalating something already bad into all manner of hideous possibilities.

I was worried for her. I was already worried for Petra. But I now was worried for myself, as well. As with, for starters, the avenging lawyer father who found out that I was Petra’s confidante. I was in this, and I shouldn’t have been—according to the law, I absolutely shouldn’t have been because I was not Petra’s parent.

But what was the point of further agitating Bonnie? What would that make better? I tried soothing her instead, floating meaningless syllables that seemed sufficiently like English. “… frightened him … surely he won’t … your anger may have … no cause to worry about … apparently he doesn’t know … not to worry unduly if …”

“I’m afraid he’ll call my parents. Then I’ll be in trouble and so will Petra.”

Petra already was in trouble in the old-fashioned sense. And, I feared, also in a more contemporary all-purpose sense.

Worse, except for having produced one very frightened and furious young undergrad, we hadn’t moved one inch closer to finding Petra.

I took a deep breath. “It’ll be all right, Bonnie,” I said. “You’ll see. If I were you, I’d keep this between us. The police are looking for her, and it doesn’t seem as if this boy knows anything.” I wondered if I meant what I was saying. Could the unthinkable have happened? A millennial replay of
An American Tragedy?
What else could so violently shake young people besides the idea that their futures and dreams had been canceled by an accidental pregnancy? But that was then. My mother’s generation,
not mine, and not Petra’s or Ethan’s. The good old days, as Roy Stanton and few women would say.

Still, until Bonnie had said that, I hadn’t considered the idea that Petra might have come to harm—except for the harm she would be doing herself on the streets or as a runaway. Now, the idea was there, as improbable as it still seemed. I told myself that this boy had simply been rattled, and that Bonnie had behaved ludicrously, over-dramatically, and it all added up to nothing. “Can you keep this our secret for a while?”

She nodded.

I had to think, but didn’t feel capable of doing so because all thoughts led to dead ends. I couldn’t picture what would be improved by bringing Ethan into the mix, or telling Petra’s parents or the police about him. I thought it would only increase the potential for hysteria, punishment, and retaliation.

Or was I simply not thinking, and would, perhaps, things be worse because of not doing so?

I wished that once, just once, I’d have a clear sense of what I was supposed to do.

I
WAS BARELY INTO THE SCHOOL, STILL IN THE FRONT
entry, when I spotted Gretchen Coulter outside, looking dislocated and uncomfortable. I walked down and over to her, surprised to see her.

I couldn’t tell if she was glad or further upset by my approach. “Gretchen,” I said. “I want to say how terribly sorry I am—everybody is—about your mother. It’s so sad. My sympathy.”

She looked suspicious of my words and motives.

“If there’s anything I can do—”

“I didn’t know what to do at home, anymore,” she said.

I nodded. “It’s good to be with other people.” I hoped I wasn’t as inane as I thought I was.

“Miss Pepper,” she said when we were back at the school’s entryway. “There is something.”

“Yes. What? Anything!”

“Please don’t be angry, but I know what you’re doing, what you think, and I wish you’d stop. You’re making everything worse.”

“But I—what? What do you mean?”

“About my
mother.”
Gretchen was a pretty child, with much of her mother visible in her face and personality. Because of her dyslexia, she’d had a dreadful time in a competitive elementary school, and now was with us. Once she began coping with her disability, she showed
signs of becoming the firebrand that Helen had been. Today she was understandably subdued, but I still saw a spark of that other self as she said the word
mother.

“I know you think you’re being helpful, but you aren’t. My father’s really upset and you’re making him more upset. He’s—please just stop!”

I took a deep breath. “What, precisely, am I doing?” I hadn’t, as far as I could tell, done one damn thing. Except notify the police about the Dumpster, which hardly seemed something to further disrupt the Coulters.

She eyed me coldly. “You know. Saying my mother didn’t … you know.” She looked down, twisted her lowered head to an odd angle, as if trying to avoid seeing everything that surrounded her. “Didn’t … do it on purpose,” she finally said.
“Investigating
as if … somebody … even as if my father …”

“How—why—where did you hear this?”

“Mrs. Parisi.”

Roxanne? Why on earth would any well-meaning adult trouble this child with such—“She shouldn’t have—”

“I made her. I was looking out my window, I saw you. I heard you ring the bell, and then I saw you talking. I asked her what it was about, and she told me.”

Nobody had made Roxanne tell this child anything. Roxanne wanted to, and now I wanted to know why.

“Did you even know my mother?” Gretchen asked me. “Why do you think that way?”

“There’s no way that I think, Gretchen. Not yet. Only that we should be absolutely sure before we make up—”

“We? Who does that mean? My father and me, we’re sure. And I don’t know why her book group should even care, should even think about it. They weren’t so nice to her.”

“What are you talking about? Who wasn’t?”

She shrugged. “That day, before the meeting at our house. My mother told me that maybe she wasn’t going to stay in the book group. That she didn’t feel comfortable there anymore, that she didn’t like being around this one person, and that if I ever felt like I didn’t want to be around somebody, be somewhere I didn’t feel good about, I should know that I could leave it.” Her voice, driven by anger and possibly grief, had regained its usual animation and force. “So it’s none of any of your business! And you’re making my father crazy!”

“Me?” It was almost a whisper. “Why?”

“He said it wasn’t as if we didn’t already have enough problems, that you and the other women were pawing over my mother’s life, like …” She blinked rapidly and pulled her lips in.

“Oh, Gretchen. Forgive me. The last thing I meant to do was add to your pain. I’m really sorry.”

Her shoulders slumped. “Whatever.” She turned and went into the school.

Luckily, there was no chance to say more, because I’d have had to lie. For all my dismay at having created more problems for the remaining family, I still needed to know who Helen Coulter had been so that then I could know if I believed she killed herself. I still wanted to know what had really happened to Helen Coulter, largely for Gretchen’s sake. The child couldn’t say the words
suicide
or
jump.
I’d seen how those ideas seared her insides. But now, I also wanted to know why thinking of other scenarios so infuriated Ivan Coulter—the man who had been missing the day of Helen’s death. And why Roxanne had felt compelled to inform father and daughter of what should have remained quiet, nonintrusive speculation.

Surely by now the family had noticed the Dumpster graffiti. What did they make of that?

I walked into the building feeling pounds heavier than
I had just ten minutes earlier, wondering what any of this meant.

T
HE DAY, WHICH HADN’T BEGUN WELL, DID NOT IMPROVE
. My tenth-grade class had been stricken with mass amnesia. No one had ever heard of a part of speech or suspected that there could be such a thing, let alone felt capable of defining such difficult concepts as
noun.
Instead, a hoarsely disguised voice called out from the back of the class, “I know, I know! ‘Four score and twenty.’ Period. That’s a part of a speech!”

“Yeah—‘ask not what.’ That’s another part of a speech.”

“How about ‘Romeo, Romeo, wherefore’?”

I never said my kids lacked humor of a sort. But course content, things that had been repeated and reinforced since September—that, I do say, they lacked.

In truth, I was impressed they’d known bits of the Gettysburg Address, JFK’s inaugural, and Juliet’s soliloquy. They shared the great cultural heritage of the U.S. And we’d all been so needlessly worried in recent years about the loss of that basic core.

It had been such a clever, well-planned lesson, too, based on actual examples from their work. I thought they were getting the idea why “He told him that if he hit him, he’d feel even worse,” a direct quote from one of my student-writers, was not sufficiently clear. But that was when they decided that they had no idea what a pronoun was. Or any other part of speech. Or an antecedent. Or, for that matter, clarity.

My next class was somewhat intrigued by—emphasis on
somewhat
—and somewhat participated in—again, emphasis on
somewhat
—a discussion of Hawthorne’s observation that love and hate are the same things at bottom, both requiring “a high degree of intimacy and
heart-knowledge,” each making the person dependent on the other for his spiritual life. For once, they were roused—somewhat—from the ravages of spring fever, but while that should have gladdened my heart, I kept thinking about their missing class member, wondering when or if we’d get news of Petra, and whether I should be telling what I knew, and to whom. I wondered how avidly her parents were trying to find her, and tried to stifle a sick fear that they might be willing to leave things as they were—that after a feeble show of interest, they’d “accept” the status quo and go on with a post-Petra life.

A child could be unwanted at any point along the way, and most bitter of all was being unwanted long after birth, as Petra seemed to be.

Finally, the day redeemed itself by ending. Almost. Because as I repacked my briefcase, my editor in chief approached, her face in a self-satisfied smirk that made me immediately suspicious. Cinnamon waved a translucent lime plastic envelope.

I love things like that envelope. Love stationery. Containers for pens, desk organizers, lovely creations for the most mundane of objects. I promised myself a half dozen of these shiny, slick objects as my reward for this dismal day. I’d put each class’s papers in a different colored one and my entire life would turn around and be serene. Organized. Linear.

“We’ve reached a consensus.” Cinnamon waved the lime envelope. Lines of type showed through its front. She smiled broadly. “Consensus. Good word, huh?”

I nodded and walked alongside her. “We don’t have journalism today,” I reminded her.

“Right. Correct. I know that.”

This was very fast, this new material. An entire newspaper’s worth overnight? “Did you write this yourself?”

“No, Ms. Pepper. That would be wrong. It’s not my
paper, it’s the students’ paper. I called a special emergency meeting last night. To make the coverage more comprehensive, the way you said. My staff and I were up half the night.”

I glanced at her to see if she was amusing herself, but apparently, she took her role seriously, although not seriously enough to have informed me that the suddenly avid journalists of Philly Prep had held a meeting.

“I realized that we should have called you—and in fact, I did call you, but you were out. Your machine answered, so I hung up. What was the point?”

I considered dragging myself through an explanation of the point, or stating that I had indeed been home and I knew she was lying, but I was exhausted, and poorly dressed, and had bad hair. I merely said, “Next time …” Of course, as we both knew, there’d be no next time. This was the final issue of the year.

“Oh, sure. But for now, it’s done. Just what you wanted. The spectrum has widened and it’s not just prom fashions anymore. We have goals, and we have what people are doing next year, and we have columns of memories like you suggested. Lots of new things. We talked through all your points, and I think you’ll be happy. We sure are.”

“So quickly! I’m amazed by your speed,” I said.

“They may need editing, I’m not saying they wouldn’t, but we are in
essence
done. Ready to put the paper to bed!” She held her shiny lime envelope aloft as if it were a trophy.

Her high spirits wedged under my mood and lifted it. I wished I could track Cinnamon through her life, see what she did, how she behaved. I often have those wishes, and when I’m dictator of the world, there’ll be a law about this, too. Students who expect teachers to invest time, energy, wisdom, knowledge, and their very souls in the student’s
life and welfare would be obliged once a year to report back on how all that effort panned out.

“And pretty much everybody’s in it, too, so that’s great. Nobody hurt. No bad feelings for the last issue. That’s what I think.”

I had no argument with that. I was amazed by—and suspicious of—Cinnamon Stickley’s easy, complete, and speedy concession. I was also relieved that without my throwing a pedagogical fit, our final issue wouldn’t be 100 percent devoted to “Philly Phashions.”

“Want to go over this with me now?” I asked.

“Would love to, but I can’t. Got to run. Have a fitting. My prom dress, Ms. Pepper! Time’s running out. Happy reading! You chaperoning this year?”

I shook my head, pretending solemn regret. C. K. and I had done it last year and felt we’d served our time. It was fun seeing them in their finery. For a while. Then the gray zone between participant and police person became onerous and endless.

“Ooooh, too bad. I wanted you to see my gown. We’ll miss you!” She looked crestfallen—another charade—and was off.

Once in my car, while going through the familiar end-of-day malaise, I untwisted the white thread looped around the envelope’s button clasp, and pulled out the revised copy. I was indeed amazed by how industrious, productive, and swift the staff had been about shifting gears from the stupid “Phashion” issue.

Until I read the first “new” and “comprehensive” article. I then quickly thumbed through the thirty or forty remaining pages.

In fairness, the articles now did have a wider scope—Cinnamon style. The issue of what followed high school had been addressed—Cinnamon style. Ambitions and
dreams had been included—Cinnamon style. So now, a typical in-depth, broad-focus article read:

“Marsha Malloy, who hopes to attend Community College next year to become an international lawyer, will be wearing a bare-shouldered, shape-defining café-aulait silk sheath with an overlay of silk organza, with contoured yet thin straps made of black Spanish lace with a floral motif. This lace is repeated at the hemline, which is scalloped …”

In case you’re wondering, Marsha Malloy’s black extremely high-heeled sandals were by an Italian designer, Mediterranean in spirit, and pleasantly accented by a thin strip of mirror inserted into the back of the heel.

And her wrap? A cashmere shawl in the same café-aulait as the dress, should you think the journalism had been shoddy or incomplete.

One of the touted new features was a special Philly Phashion Awards for nonprom clothes of distinction.

And another was “Phashion Phailures”: a “clothes we wish we hadn’t worn” trip-down-memory-lane column.

Score: Cinnamon, ten; me, zip. How had I been so easily flummoxed?

I dreaded the battles ahead because they’d be so necessary, so tedious, and to so little point. I repacked the pages, started my car, then wondered where to go.

I was reluctant to go into the empty loft, but I couldn’t think of anyplace I had to go and I lacked the imagination to spontaneously invent a destination. Briefly, I considered another raincoat run, but remembering Gretchen’s anguished expression and the pain I’d inadvertently caused her—and was probably going to continue causing—I vetoed the idea.

A lot about Ivan Coulter troubled me. I didn’t know why he, of all people, should want to believe Helen committed suicide. Or more precisely, I could think of a
reason why, but I didn’t want to. I didn’t want Gretchen to lose both her parents, one to death, the other to prison.

All I was trying to do was find out who Helen had been. Round out the picture so that we could possibly present some ideas to the police about the suicide. Or the accident. Or the murder.

Why should that bother anyone except a murderer? If there was one.

I didn’t want an empty house. I wanted people. Happy people, wherever I could find them. A make-believe community. Were I another variety of person, I’d head for a department store or mall, but I wasn’t a shopper, not even when vaguely agitated, as now. However, it was a beautiful day that made walking a pleasure, and it even made the idea of cooking dinner sound enjoyable. It was a day on which everything should be dreamy and perfect—so I headed to Reading Terminal Market. Food shopping was in a special category of its own. Infinitely easier than finding the right dress, or gift, or pair of shoes. And people were happy contemplating an abundance of food.