Helen Hath No Fury by Gillian Roberts

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.
    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.

Nine
    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 mentelling 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 wasmadly 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