Helen had been writing me regularly since she moved to California, and her letters always seemed unnaturally cheerful: She was continually on the verge of breaking into the movies, heading off to auditions and narrowly missing out on being cast, taking tap-dance lessons, and sighting stars as they drove around town in their convertibles.
Helen was also always meeting Mr. Wonderful, the man with the connections and wherewithal who treated her like a princess, who was going to open doors for her in this crazy movie business, and whom she might even marry. But after several letters, she’d stop mentioning that particular Mr. Wonderful, and then an even more terrific Mr. Wonderful would come along, so I suspected that, in fact, she was getting involved with a series of cads who used her and then, when they were tired of her, dumped her.
I worried that Helen was in danger of becoming a floozy, and I wrote her letters warning her not to count on men to take care of her and to come up with a fallback plan in case, as seemed pretty obvious by now, the movie career didn’t pan out. But she wrote back scolding me for being negative, explaining that this was the way all girls made it in Hollywood. I hoped she was right, since I knew little about the ways of the movie world and hadn’t had much luck with men myself.
In this new letter, Helen confessed that she was pregnant by the latest Mr. Wonderful, who had wanted her to get a back-alley abortion. When she told him she was scared of those coat-hanger operations-she’d heard of women dying from them-he claimed the child wasn’t his and cut her out of his life.
Helen didn’t know what to do. She was a couple of months along. She knew she’d be fired from the millinery shop once she started showing. Auditions would also be out of the question. She was too ashamed to go back to Mom and Dad at the ranch. She was wondering if maybe she should go ahead and get the abortion after all. The whole mess, she wrote, made her want to throw herself out a window.
It was immediately clear to me what Helen needed to do. I wrote her back, telling her not to get an abortion-women did die from them. It was better for her to go ahead and have the child, then decide whether she wanted to keep it or give it up for adoption. She could come to Red Lake, I wrote, and live with me in the teacherage until she figured out what to do.
Helen arrived in Flagstaff a week later, and Jim let me borrow the Flivver to drive over and meet her. As she stepped down from the train carrying a raccoon coat that Mr. Wonderful had probably given her, I had to bite my lip. Her slim shoulders seemed thinner than ever, but her face was puffy, and her eyes were red from crying. She’d also peroxided her hair to that shiny white color that a lot of the starlets were favoring. When I gave her a hug, I was startled by how fragile she felt, as if she had a collapsible little bird’s body. As soon as we got into the Flivver, she lit a cigarette, and I noticed her hands were shaking.
On the way back to Red Lake, I did most of the talking. I’d spent the last week thinking about Helen’s predicament, and as we drove through the range, I laid out what I thought were her options. I could write Mom and Dad, explaining the situation and softening them up, and I was sure they’d forgive her and welcome her home. I’d gotten the name of an orphanage in Phoenix if she wanted to go that route. There were also a lot of men in Coconino County in search of a wife, and she might be able to find someone who’d be willing to marry her even though she was in a family way. Two possibilities that had occurred to me were Rooster and Jim Smith, but I didn’t get into specifics.
Helen, however, seemed distracted, almost in a daze. Smoking cigarette after cigarette, she spoke in fragmented sentences, and instead of focusing on practicalities, her mind drifted all over the place. She kept returning to totally ludicrous plans and pointless concerns, wondering if she could get Mr. Wonderful back by putting the child into an orphanage and worrying if childbirth would ruin her figure for bathing-suit scenes in movies.
“Helen, it’s time to get realistic,” I said.
“I am being realistic,” she said. “A girl without a figure is never going to make it.”
I decided this was not the moment to push the point. When someone’s wounded, the first order of business is to stop the bleeding. You can figure out later how best to help them heal.
MY BED WAS SMALL, but I scooted over so Helen and I could sleep side by side, just as we had done when we were kids. It was October, and the desert nights were turning cold, so we snuggled together, and sometimes late at night, Helen would start whimpering, which I took as a good sign because it meant that at least once in a while she seemed to understand how grim the situation was. When that happened, I held her close and reassured her that we’d get through this, just the way we’d survived that flash flood in Texas when we were kids.
“All we need to do,” I’d say, “is find us that cottonwood tree to climb up in, and we’ll make it.”
During the day, while I was teaching, Helen kept to herself in that little room. She never made any noise and spent a lot of time sleeping. I’d hoped that once she’d gotten some rest, her mind would clear, and she’d be able to start thinking about her future in a constructive fashion. But she continued to be vague and listless, talking about Hollywood in a dreamy way that, quite frankly, irritated me.
I decided Helen needed fresh air and sunshine. We went for a stroll through town every afternoon, and I introduced her to people as my sister from Los Angeles who’d come out to the desert to cure the vapors. The next time I had a race scheduled, Jim Smith brought Helen along in the Flivver. He was courteous and considerate, but as soon as I saw them together, I could tell they were not meant for each other.
Rooster, however, immediately took a shine to Helen. “She’s real purty,” he confided to me.
But Helen had no interest in Rooster. “He swallows his tobacco juice,” she said. “I get sick every time I see his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down.”
I didn’t think Helen could afford to be picky at this particular juncture, but it was true that a part-time deputy who’d only just learned to write his name wouldn’t make the best husband for her.
Helen loved my crimson shirt. When she saw me in it, she smiled for the first time since coming to Red Lake. She asked to try it on and seemed so excited while she was buttoning it up that I thought maybe she had shaken off her blues. But as she was tucking the shirt into her skirt, I saw that she was beginning to show. Our story about her coming here to take the desert air wasn’t going to wash much longer, I realized, and regardless of her mood, her problems weren’t going to go away.
HELEN AND I STARTED attending the Catholic church in Red Lake. It was a dusty little adobe mission, and I didn’t particularly cotton to the priest, Father Cavanaugh, a gaunt, humorless man whose scowl could peel the paint off a barn. But a lot of the local farmers went there, and I thought Helen might meet someone nice.
One day about six weeks after Helen had arrived, we were in the stuffy church, standing then kneeling then sitting then standing again as we listened to the mass. Incense wafted up to the ceiling. Helen had been wearing baggy dresses and a loose coat to hide her condition, but suddenly, she fainted dead away. Father Cavanaugh rushed down from the altar. He felt her forehead, then looked at her for a moment, and something made him touch her stomach. “She’s with child,” he said. He glanced at her ringless fingers. “And unmarried.”
Father Cavanaugh told Helen she must make a full confession. When she did, instead of offering her forgiveness, he warned her that her soul was in mortal danger. Because she had committed the sin of lust, he said, the only place for her in this world was one of the church’s homes for wayward women.
Helen came back from the visit with Father Cavanaugh more distraught than I’d ever seen her. She had no intention of going to any home-and I wouldn’t have let her-but now her secret was out, and the townspeople of Red Lake began regarding both of us differently. Women stared at the ground when they passed us on the street, and cowboys felt free to give us the eye, as if the word had gone around that we were loose women. Once when we walked by a Mexican grandmother sitting on a bench, I looked back, and she was making the sign of the cross.
Early one evening a couple of weeks after Helen made her confession, I heard a knock on the teacherage door. Superintendent MacIntosh-the same man who had given me the boot from my teaching job when the war was over-was standing there.
He tipped his fedora, then looked past me into the room, where Helen was washing the supper plates in a tin pan. “Miss Casey, may I have a word with you in private?” he asked me.
“I’ll go for a walk,” Helen said. She wiped her hands on her apron and made her way past Mr. MacIntosh, who, making a great show of civility, tipped his hat a second time.
Since I didn’t want Mr. MacIntosh looking at the dirty dishes as well as Helen’s suitcase lying open on the floor, I led him through the connecting door into the classroom.
Looking out the window and fingering the brim of his fedora, Mr. MacIntosh cleared his throat nervously. Then he began what was obviously a prepared speech about Helen’s condition, moral standards, school policy, impressionable schoolchildren, the need to set a good example, the reputation of the Arizona Board of Education. I started arguing that Helen had no one else to turn to and stayed well away from the students, but Mr. MacIntosh said there was no room for discussion, he was getting pressure from a lot of the parents, the matter was out of his hands, and while he was sorry he had to say it, the fact was, if I wanted to keep my job, Helen had to go. Then he put on his fedora and left.
I still felt stung and humiliated, and I sat down for a moment at my desk. For the second time in my life, that fish-faced pencil pusher Mr. MacIntosh was telling me I wasn’t wanted. The parents of my schoolkids included cattle rustlers, drunks, land speculators, bootleggers, gamblers, and former prostitutes. They didn’t mind me racing horses, playing poker, or drinking contraband whiskey, but my showing some compassion to a sister who’d been taken advantage of and then abandoned by a smooth-talking scoundrel filled them with moral indignation. It made me want to throttle them all.
I walked back into the teacherage. Helen was sitting on the bed smoking a cigarette. “I didn’t really go for a walk,” she said. “I heard everything.”
I SPENT THE NIGHT holding Helen in my arms, trying to reassure her that it was all going to work out. We’d write Mom and Dad, I told her. They’d understand. This sort of thing happened to young women all the time, and she could go live at the ranch until the baby was born. I’d start racing horses every weekend, and I’d save all my winnings for her and the baby, and when it was born, Buster and Dorothy could raise the child as theirs and Helen would have money to go start a new life in some fun place like New Orleans or Kansas City. “We have all sorts of options,” I said. “But this one makes the most sense.”
Helen, however, was inconsolable. She was convinced that Mom in particular would never forgive her for bringing shame on the family. Mom and Dad would disown her, she believed, the same way our servant girl Lupe’s parents had kicked her out when she got pregnant. No man would ever want her again, Helen said, she had no place to go. She wasn’t as strong as me, she said, and couldn’t make it on her own.
“Don’t you ever feel like giving up?” Helen asked. “I just feel like giving up.”
“That’s nonsense,” I said. “You’re much stronger than you think. There’s always a way out.” I talked again about the cottonwood tree. I also told her about the time I was sent home from the Sisters of Loretto because Dad wouldn’t pay my tuition, and how Mother Albertina had told me that when God closes a window, he opens a door, and it was up to us to find it.
Helen finally seemed to find some comfort in my words. “Maybe you’re right,” she said. “Maybe there’s a way.”
I was still awake and lying in bed with Helen when the first gray light of dawn began to appear in the window. Helen had finally fallen asleep, and I studied her face as it emerged from the shadows. That silly platinum hair had fallen forward, and I tucked it behind her ear. Her eyes were swollen from all the crying she’d been doing, but her features were still delicate, her skin still pale and smooth, and as the light filled the room, her face seemed to glow. She looked to me like an angel, a slightly bloated, pregnant angel, but an angel nonetheless.
All of a sudden I felt a lot better about things. It was Saturday. I got out of bed, put on my trousers, and brewed some strong coffee. When it was ready, I brought Helen a cup and told her it was time to rise and shine. A new day was beginning, and we had to get out in the world and make the most of it. What we’d do, I said, was borrow the Flivver from Jim and go for a picnic up to the Grand Canyon. Those mighty cliffs would give us some perspective on our puny little problems.
Helen smiled as she sat there drinking her coffee. I told her I’d go get the car while she got dressed, and we’d get an early start to make the most of the day. “Back in a jiffy,” I said at the door.
“Okay,” Helen said. “And Lily, I’m glad you asked me to come out here.”
It was a beautiful morning, the air so clear and crisp in the sharp light of the November sun that every twig and blade of grass stood out. The range had turned the color of hay. There was not a wisp of cloud to be seen anywhere, and mourning doves were cooing in the cedars. I walked past the old adobe houses and the newer frame houses, past the café and the gas station, past the farm families in town for market day, then all at once I felt like something was choking me.
I put my hand to my throat, and in that instant I was overtaken with a horrible feeling of dread. I turned and ran back as fast as I could, the stores and houses and puzzled farmers all flying by in one big blur, but when I flung open the door, I was too late.
My little sister was dangling from a rafter, a kicked-over chair beneath her. She’d hanged herself.
FATHER CAVANAUGH WOULDN’T LET me bury Helen in the Catholic cemetery. Suicide was a mortal sin, he said, the worst of all sins, because it was the only one for which it was impossible to repent and receive forgiveness; therefore, suicides were not allowed to be buried in hallowed ground.
So Jim, Rooster, and I drove out onto the range, far from town. We found a beautiful site at the top of a rise overlooking a shallow forested valley-so beautiful that I knew in God’s eyes it must be sacred-and we buried Helen there, in my red silk shirt.