Helen Hath No Fury (4 page)

T
HE LOFT DID NOT FEEL WELCOMING WHEN
I
FINALLY
reached it. In fact, it felt cavernous and stale, and I resolved to fully furnish it. It needed its sharp corners and soaring ceilings softened by homely, homey objects, especially at a time like this. Now, in its large emptiness, I too clearly understood vulnerability and loneliness.

I made myself tea with honey, as if I were ill, and then I glanced at the mail I’d brought up with me. Nothing much in the way of companionship there. Bills, circulars, a coupon mailer, and a postcard of a generic palm tree and sandy beach from my parents. As my father had undoubtedly already muttered, just out of ear range of my mother, the scene might have been of Florida where they live rather than whatever port this was.

I turned on the TV for the sound of a human voice, but the voice I heard identified itself as Roy Stanton Harris, champion of some mythical patriarchal paradise. “Okay, girlies,” he said. “You brainless females, I know what’s best for you.”

Okay, that wasn’t what his ad actually said, but that’s what I heard. Even though he spoke with such charm and was so attractive, he infuriated me.

I turned off the set, but I still needed to talk to somebody. Not sure precisely who that would be—I hated
bothering Mackenzie, assuming he’d even be reachable—I lifted the receiver.

It beeped. I keep forgetting to check for messages these days, now that we no longer have a machine with a light that blinks a
yoo-hoo!
Now messages are secretly stored inside the phone. All a person needs to do is lift and check.

This person forgets more often than not.

There was one message. Susan Hileman, sounding unnaturally subdued and taciturn. “Call me as soon as you can. I’m at the office.”

She knew. Susan’s normal tone is as bouncy as her red curls. This tone said she had bad news she didn’t want to leave on a machine. Besides, as with most of the other book group members, I had little contact with Susan outside the monthly meetings. She’d probably never left me a message that didn’t have to do with what we were reading or where we were meeting.

She picked up while the phone was still on the first ring, and when I identified myself, she exhaled so emphatically, it was a sonic boom in the earpiece. “Thank God! I’ve been—well, I’ve just been. I thought teachers got home early! Listen, I’m glad you called back before I had to leave, because—”

“I know.”

“Who told you? We made a chain, like for book group, and you were my call, so who—”

I explained about my raincoat, about the police, the old lady across the street. It was a rough sort of comfort to have such mundane facts to relate, because it was impossible to talk about the real subject, to talk about Helen.

I could feel the pitiable limits of responses available, none of which felt as if it were up to the gravity of the situation, of its meaning or meaninglessness. “I don’t
know any details,” I finally said. “Do you know what happened exactly? Or how?”

“The roof garden railing was temporary—chicken wire, remember? She kept us all away from it last night, so how could she forget today? But apparently, she leaned against it and fell. Four and a half stories.”

“What was she doing up there?”

“Checking some work, as I understand it.”

“But I thought no work was going on. The crew’s at Tess’s house.” I stopped myself. “Sorry. I’m talking as if that matters. As if I’ll explain why it isn’t possible that happened, and then it will turn out that it didn’t happen.”

“Clary called me,” Susan said after a pause. “She started a book group chain. Also other chains, for other parts of Helen’s life.”

I was impressed by Clary’s efficiency, and I stifled thoughts that it might be cold of her. Unemotional. Untouched. Some people had businesslike habits ingrained, I reminded myself.

“You call Tess, she’ll call Louisa, and that’s it,” Susan said. “This is awful, isn’t it? I’m so upset, I keep crying. I mean I don’t know what to do. This feels… impossible.”

“Her poor daughter. And Ivan. He must be devastated!”

“Probably would be, if anybody could find and tell him.”

“Meaning?”

“He isn’t in Cleveland where he said he’d be. At least not at the hotel he said. Never had a reservation.” She dropped the matter-of-fact, no-inflection tone she’d adopted. “Damn but I hope the explanation isn’t as tawdry as it sounds like it’s going to be.”

“I’m sure it isn’t. He dotes on her. Don’t read things into this. There is undoubtedly a boring explanation. Somebody had the wrong information, or his plans changed
and Helen knew but it wasn’t worth repeating to anyone else. Not everything is suspicious, Susan. Not everything’s mysterious. This is real life.”

“I never said!”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply …” I did mean to. Susan’s imagination is hyperactive and there’s no Ritalin for that. I think the fertility of her brain is what keeps her from ending her books. She invents alternative scenarios, comes up with ever new options.

But that was neither here nor there. What was here was Helen, dead.

“What about Gretchen?” Susan asked. “She surely needs her father! She’s with Clary, it isn’t as if she’s abandoned, but still … it’s horrible, his not being reachable at a time like this.”

“Poor girl. This is such a shame for her …”

We could as easily have said, “Whush, whush, whush.” We were making noise to stave off that time when we’d have to hang up and be alone with our bad thoughts. Eventually we faced it and hung up.

I sat and thought about Helen. I could see almost any one of the rest of us becoming so distracted that we ignored the rickety temporary fence, but Helen was the least flibbertigibbety of us all. And she was intensely involved in every decision concerning the reconstruction of her house and was unlikely to lapse into sudden daydreaming while inspecting the work on the roof.

On the other hand, she hadn’t been herself the night before. Preoccupied. Agitated. Antagonistic. Maybe she hadn’t been thinking clearly.

I wished Mackenzie were home. Or anybody. Anything.

Actually, anything was, but the cat was completely occupied by his five P.M. nap and wasn’t swayed by my need for companionship.

I remembered I was supposed to make a call as part of
the chain. Except I couldn’t remember whether I called Tess or Louisa, and she was Clary’s sister, so surely she already knew, even if I was supposed to call her.

I was making excuses. I decided that I’d call them both, starting with Tess. How woefully different I was from Clary Oliver, who’d efficiently organized the spreading of the sad news, who would have remembered who it was she was supposed to call. On the other hand, why hadn’t she called her own sister? Maybe she disliked Louisa as much as I did.

After hearing my news, Tess said nothing for a long time. Then, her voice tight, she said, “I can’t believe anybody could be so stupid as to put up a fence that weak.”

I’d expected something more profound from a psychologist. “They assumed nobody would be up there till the brick wall was up,” I said softly.

And then, as if she heard herself, she sighed loudly. “Sorry. I’m having trouble absorbing this. I guess I’m looking for somebody, something, anything, to blame. As if that would make it better.”

“I wish I could think of anything that could.”

We did some more of the whush-whush-whush platitudes, and then Tess seemed to regain her balance a bit. “I’ll bet everybody’s as lost about this as the two of us are,” she said. “What if … it would be good if we got together—whoever wants to—to talk as soon as possible. The sooner the better. Tomorrow night seems good.”

“Group therapy?” I wasn’t sure about this idea. It sounded too … too something. Not Helen-ish at all. Not book-club-ish.

“We’ll talk, remember her, deal with our feelings about this horrible accident. We all feel the impulse to make contact at times like these. We could help each other.”

I certainly shared that need to communicate, make
some kind of contact with other people who would understand. I couldn’t think of any objection to Tess’s idea, and not only agreed, but offered the loft as the meeting space. We made rudimentary decisions about time and food—everybody would bring whatever she felt like, if anything at all. Funeral food. Folding chairs. Then we, too, hung up. I had a job now—I had to phone two people with the specific plan, which I then did, commiserating and repeating that time-filling talk.

I also had another job. I had to clean the place. It seemed frivolous and shallow to worry about such things now. But on the other hand, it beat thinking about Helen’s death.

In fact, cleaning filled time and gave me purpose, which is, perhaps, why it used to be so popular an activity with my sex.

I plumped pillows, ran a dust cloth across the oak table, straightened a stack of unread magazines, dry-mopped the floor, polished the bathroom.

And then, I was out of steam and surfaces. I tried to mark papers, but couldn’t focus on anything but Helen. That hideous fall. The way everything can change in an instant.

I tried to read a magazine. I turned pages, ripped out the cardboard inserts and ads so that the pages would lie more smoothly, and then I gave up on that, too.

When the phone rang, I grabbed it with unwholesome eagerness. I knew it was one of us—the book group woven tightly together because of this tragedy. It might even be somebody notifying me of what I’d already notified someone else. The circle would go round and round because so were we—spinning in the absolute confusion that follows having assumptions and expectations irrevocably snap.

This time, it was Louisa. I’d never called her, but she
knew. She sounded subdued and unlike herself. When Louisa speaks, it’s generally in overlong, staccato bursts. Luckily, most of the time, she’s silent. Louisa is Clary Oliver’s younger sister, and I think that’s the only reason she’s in the group. She’s like a dim copy of her sister, and it’s possible she’s spent her life being angry about that, because all her energy seems to go into grievance collecting and self-pity. She’d outdone her sister only once—by having three divorces to Clary’s two. But Clary was a successful and self-supporting businesswoman, and Louisa had spun through half a dozen fizzled career plans. She was currently a consultant to nonprofits, but I had heard Helen once refer to Louisa herself as a nonprofit and, another time, as a business liability. It was assumed by everyone that Clary supported her and her children, and it was further rumored that Helen resented the time, energy, and resources given over to Clary’s younger sister.

“Did you hear?” she asked. “About Helen?”

This was late to be asking, and I was surprised that she’d call me, consider me a possible source of comfort. “It’s dreadful.”

“My sister is sick about this. Do you believe it, though?”

“Believe what?”

There was a moment’s missed beat. Then Louisa spoke again, even more slowly. “Then you didn’t hear. You don’t know.”

She paused. She paused longer. She knew something I didn’t, and she had to be sure that was perfectly clear. Her need to establish tiny footholds of power wherever, however she could was one of the many reasons I didn’t like Louisa.

“Okay,” I said. “Obviously, I don’t. What is it that I don’t know?”

She cleared her throat. “Helen’s death,” she said. “It wasn’t an accident. She did it on purpose. Helen committed suicide.”

L
OUISA EXHALED DRAMATICALLY
. I
EXCLAIMED, EXPRESSED
shock, horror, confusion. Louisa exhaled again. I could almost smell her cigarette’s smoke through the receiver. Despite the horrible and somewhat urgent nature of her call’s content, she was going to insist on being begged.

I obliged her. “Why would you say that? Helen seemed the last person who’d—that roof garden was unfinished. Remember how she kept us away from the fencing last night?”

“Which only shows that she knew it was dangerous, don’t you see that? So why would she go out onto it today—”

“Because she was working with—wait a minute. You think she committed suicide because she went up there knowing it was unfinished?” That made no sense.

“That’s not what I’m saying at all!”

“Then say what you’re saying, Louisa. Please. And why you’re saying it.”

“I’m saying it because it’s true. Helen left a note. Clary found a notebook in her desk. A little loose-leaf thing she used like a scratch pad. Recipes, notes to herself, lists. And this long thing about shame and disgrace—”

“This thing—she wrote it or was she quoting it?”

“It wasn’t like she had quotes around it or anything,
or Clary would have said. It said about how what she was going to do would upset her family and how she hated to do it, but she had to hope they’d come to understand that she had no other choice.”

“No other choice?” The worst of all possible short sentences.

“That’s exactly the way I heard it. No other choice.”

I was dumbfounded. I pictured Helen last night, so alive, so charged up. “But she … Helen was upset last night about Edna’s suicide in the book.”

“I think that was because the author made her do it—a plot device, that’s what annoyed her,” Louisa said.

I suddenly couldn’t remember clearly what precisely Helen had said, and then I thought, and almost convinced myself, that maybe she overreacted to what Edna Pontellier chose to do because she herself was becoming obsessed with the same act.

“Don’t act like I’m making this stuff up, Amanda! Clary
told
me!” The hysteria-edged staccato was back. “That’s what Helen’s own handwriting said, unless you’re calling my sister a liar.”

I really didn’t like Louisa, and her reactions were off center. I didn’t dignify her stupid challenge with an answer. “Whatever that writing meant—would a person work all morning, looking normal—”

“We don’t know if she was. Maybe she was upset all morning, too.”

“Anybody say so?”

“I don’t know if anybody’s asked. I only know what I told you. I thought I was doing you a favor, telling you. Why all these questions?”

“Still and all—it seems too … to go to work, then take a lunch break to go home and leap off the roof?” I asked her to repeat what she remembered of the message.
“In a notebook,” I said. “That isn’t the same as leaving a note.”

“Who
cares
what it’s in? What it says is what matters. I’m
sick
about this,” she said. “Yesterday afternoon, Helen and I had a major … she’d just about ruined my life. She’s—she was on the board of the preschool and my Jared was not admitted and I’m sure she had a hand in that because she was angry about a loan I had to get from Clary, and—”

“Please,” I said. “Please.” Who cared right now about Jared’s preschool choice? How could she go on this way?

“It isn’t my fault if my ex hasn’t come up with one support payment in the last—”

Louisa actually had two topics. Her children
and
how badly every person she’d ever met had treated her. She emitted another smoky sigh, and I pictured her staring ceilingward, watching her exhalation trail up and around the room. “I could see how upset Helen was last night. She wasn’t herself, and I felt bad about causing it, but a mother has to protect her children, doesn’t she?”

“Thanks for calling me,” I said, eager to be rid of her. “I’m sorry it was such awful news, but—”

“But the thing is,” she said, “it was a fairly … it wasn’t a … I was furious, Amanda. You can understand. I may have gone overboard, said things …” She let out a small wail. “He’s my
child!
This is about his entire
future!
Her vindictive power play … but even so, what if I
drove
her to this? This level of despair?”

This was another of the many reasons I didn’t like Louisa. She was the absolute center of the solar system and everything was about her, even somebody else’s suicide.

“I’m sure you didn’t drive her to anything. Whatever happened has nothing to do with—”

“I hated how we’d left it,” Louisa said. “So I called her
this morning, and I’m sorry, but my temper got the best of me again. I said some bad things. I … shouldn’t have, I know. Repeated rumors. I should have kept my mouth shut.”

“Rumors?”

“About her personal life. I’m not going to make the same mistake and repeat them again.”

Ivan, I thought. Ivan who wasn’t where he was supposed to be. Ivan. His name in that context felt like a deadweight, pulling me down.

“I just … I made things worse. And then, three hours later, she did this horrible thing! We never got to make peace, to set things right. This is on my conscience forever and—”

“You need closure,” I said, although in normal circumstances I wouldn’t have used that term, that idea, except for doors. “That’s exactly the sort of thing Tess is hoping for from tomorrow night’s get-together. It’ll be good for you, and I’ll see you then.”

I hung up and pushed Louisa from my mind. There wasn’t any room for her anyway, only for Helen, who was ballooning into every crevasse, pushing against my skull—white noise, white light everywhere, but nothing I could identify or hold on to.

Was this possible? Could a woman’s will to live so suddenly give way?

What did we know about anyone, if something like this could happen the day after we’d been together, exchanging ideas?

I was standing in a large, safe room in the waning light of afternoon. All the walls and windows were intact and sealed against the outside world, and my feet were planted on solid ground, but I braced myself against the side of the range, held on to its edge because if I let go, I was sure I was going to slide across the floor and become
what I kept seeing in front of my eyes—a body hurtling through space.

I couldn’t stop thinking of Helen. I hadn’t known her well, but I’d admired what I knew of her. She had competency—a rare and undervalued commodity. She made her life fit, turning her artistic bent into a successful commercial venture while raising her daughter and maintaining a solid marriage.

A seemingly solid marriage. I hoped somebody had located Ivan by now, and I hoped still more fervently that his mysterious whereabouts had turned out to be innocuous.

But Helen. Helen had juggled home and career—hers and his, to some extent, hostessing for Ivan’s business events as well as for her own. She was attractive, fit, and always wonderfully put together. She’d organized the book group, years before I joined it, because she made time for books, she’d said with an embarrassed smile—rising extra early so that she could read for pleasure every day—at five A.M. That in itself was proof enough for me of exceptional qualities.

I couldn’t believe any of what I’d perceived was an act. She was a woman trying hard—and mostly succeeding—at taking on the world on her terms. This was not in any way my picture of a suicide in the making.

And she’d
hated
Edna’s suicide. Not just as a literary device, a way of ending a book. She’d had contempt for the woman, or at least for the author who’d allowed such an end to pretend to be a solution—but no matter how visceral Helen’s reaction had seemed, how from her heart, even I could hear how weak an argument that would sound like. That was fiction. This was real life.

Helen was dead. It hurt to think it.

I made myself dinner and it sat in front of me, cooling and coagulating while I stared at a TV show I couldn’t have described two minutes later to save my life except
that there were people roughly my age, looking like they were having a lot more fun than I was even though they were complaining that they should have been having a lot more fun than they already were.

I sat, curled into myself on the sofa, until Mackenzie bounded into the loft. I’d been waiting for him, so consumed with the miserable events of the day that I was stunned by his ebullient greetings, how hyperalive he seemed, wired and thoroughly enjoying life.

“Am I ever glad to see you!” he said. “I have just heard the chronicles of hell, the fleecing and emotional torture of Tom the Man, although, of course, that’s all in the past, says he. This bride is ‘a little bit immature’ but she makes him feel ‘alive.’” He flopped down on the sofa next to me and leaned close.

It seemed too cruel, too inappropriate to tap his shoulder and say, “Excuse me, I have news of a rather more serious character.” There should be some protocol for that, some early-warning system. But if there is, I didn’t know it, and so instead, I let him ramble on.

“I never had the heart to suggest that he’d said the same thing about the recently shedded missus. I felt like a secret hoarder in the war of the sexes—I knew I’d go home to somebody wonderful, somebody who was nothing at all like Tom’s women. Not any of them.”

“Damned with faint praise,” I said.

“I didn’t mean it that way.”

I knew he hadn’t, and I was flattered and glad to have him go on. I just couldn’t seem to express that sort of feeling right now or tell him why I couldn’t express those feelings right now, tell him about Helen. Helen alive, Helen hurtling, Helen gone.

“A guy who can’t live with or by himself. He said as much.” By now, Mackenzie was doing his sofa stretch, legs straight out to the ground and arms above his head,
hands clasped. It’s an almost unconscious end-of-day routine for him, as if he’s shucking the accumulated tensions and irritants of the day, physically expanding until there’s no room for them in his system. It stretches just about every muscle, and normally even gives the viewer—when the viewer feels normal—a small lust-lurch, because it provides a full and unimpeded view of his excellent physique.

But there are few things as incomprehensible as a happy person when you yourself are miserable, and so my peevishness turned his stretch into flaunting himself. And worse, releasing his day’s tensions while I held mine inside like an undigestible hair ball.

“Mackenzie,” I said. “Listen up. I’m glad you’re in such a great mood, but—”

“I do go on, don’t I?” He straightened himself back into a sitting position. “Your turn. How was your day?”

I felt like a rain cloud about to dump its contents on poor C. K. Mackenzie’s undeserving head. “I’ve had some horrible news.”

He was all contrition. “I’m so sorry! What happened? To whom? What?”

I have to say that his ability to listen when so requested was perfectly honed.

I took him through Helen’s story stage by stage, including meeting the old woman who had witnessed Helen’s fall. And finally, I told him about Louisa’s call and the latest announcement, that Helen had been a suicide.

He nodded, he actively listened, he looked concerned and upset and whatever else I would have wanted, and I should have been able to relax, but I couldn’t. Instead, tension gripped a clenched fist on the nape of my neck.

I knew why.

I didn’t buy Louisa’s explanation, no matter what notes Helen had written. But I also knew how Mackenzie
was going to react to my saying so. If I did. Which I would, because keeping my mouth shut is not one of my more practiced skills. “I can’t believe it,” I blurted out.

“No wonder. It’s staggering news. A friend, somebody you saw last night—”

“I mean it literally. I can’t believe it.”

“Believe what?”

I shook my head. “Everything I know about people—about anybody—makes it impossible to believe either idea. She shouldn’t have been up there. Her work crew was at Tess’s, not at her house. Why leave work to go up there? And suicide doesn’t fit. I saw her furious that even a fictional woman would try to solve a problem by suicide. She was so emphatic that she seemed silly—a woman beating a dead Edna, if you’ll pardon me for what I was thinking. But given her abhorrence for what the woman in the novel did, it’s impossible to believe that the very next day she’d think it was a good idea.”

“So you’re sayin’ it couldn’t have been an accident, and it couldn’t have been suicide, despite the note.”

“The so-called note was in a notebook—a three-ring notebook. Who knows who it was for or what it meant?”

He nodded. “Despite that.”

“Guess so,” I said. “Or …”

His expression was suddenly hard edged. “You suggesting foul play?”

Now he’d tell me I was a fool, that the police know best. I waited, ready to pounce when he warned me off from the world of thinking.

Except he didn’t. What he did was wait, along with me.

“If I did … you seem as if you aren’t … well, aren’t you going to tell me I’m being crazy, or ridiculous?” I finally asked.

“Why would I? I haven’t even heard your complete reasoning process yet.”

“You always do.”

“A man can learn,” he said gently. “You’ve been right before.”

The planet shifted gears. “You’re—you’re making fun of me, aren’t you?”

“You’re paranoid.”

I looked directly at him.

He smiled. “I’m waitin’,” he said. “I’m listenin’.”

For once, I was speechless.