Seesaw
HAD it not been for the deathbed promise Mary had exacted, Helen would have escaped to college some two months after her mother died. But now she was trapped for a minimum of fourteen months in the domestic environment where her mother had been the dominant spirit; where her mother had crumbled away because of a wound Helen felt she had herself inflicted; where the beautiful inanimate body had been washed and laid in state. Unable to disentangle herself from guilt and painful memories, the girl who had for the first sixteen years of her life been healthy, became sickly and morbid.
Her basic function proved not to be supplying companionship for her father, who was often away from home and in any case closer to Frank with whom Helen quarreled. She was sentenced to be housekeeper and executive-of-all-work for the large establishments, in city and country, that remained the base of the expanding family. Directing the servants, doing herself what they would not or could not do, she arranged the long or short stays of her seven siblings, along with their friends, fiancés, wives, newborn babies. Her relatives felt pangs of guilt at pouring so much on Helen’s “seventeen-year-old shoulders,” but they had their own affairs to attend to. Carey wrote in the same sentence that she was “dreadfully sorry” and that she found Helen’s activities “a great comfort.”1
Helen diagnosed in herself some female ailment and wrote Carey about it. The Dean was instantly up in arms. Helen would have to tell her father. He could not, Carey supposed, refuse to let her have treatment, but if he did —! Although Carey had recommended a female doc
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