claiming he had taken his own life. Then, after a great deal of harrumphing and muttering under their corporate breath, they had offered a substantial settlement.
They were persuaded to do this by a poker-buddy of John Leydecker's named Howard Hayman. When he wasn't playing lowball, five-card stud, and three-card draw, Hayman was a laxvyer who employed lunching on insurance companies.
Leydecker had re-met Helen at Ralph and Lois's in February of 1994, had fallen head over heels in fascination with her ("It was never quite love," he told Ralph and Lois later, "which was probably just as well, considering how things turned out"), and had introduced her to Hayman because he thought the insurance company was trying to screw her. "He was not suicidal," Leydecker said, and stuck to that long after Helen had handed him his hat and shown him the door.
After being faced with a suit in which Howard Hayman threatened to make Great Eastern look like Snidely Whiplash tying Little a Nell to the railroad tracks, Helen had received a check for seventy thousand dollars. In the late fall of 1994 she had used most of this money to build a house on Harris Avenue, just three doors up from her old place and right across from Harriet Bennigan's.
"I was never really happy on the east side," she told Lois one day in November of that year. They were on their way back from the park, and Natalie had been sitting slumped and fast asleep in her stroller, her presence little more than a p k os 1 in n e-tip and a fog of cold breath below a large ski-hat which Lois had knitted herself. "I used to dream about Harris Avenue. Isn't that crazy?"
"I don't think dreams are ever crazy," Lois replied.
Helen and John Leydecker dated for most of that summer, but neither Ralph nor Lois was particularly surprised when the courtship abruptly ended after Labor Day, or when Helen began to wear a discreet pink triangle pin on her prim, high-necked librarian's blouses.
Perhaps they were not surprised because they were old enough to have seen everything at least once, or perhaps on some deep level they were still glimpsing the auras which surround thinls.
I creating a bright gateway opening on a secret city of hidden meanings, concealed motives, and camouflaged agendas.
Ralph and Lois babysat Natalie frequently after Helen moved back to Harris Avenue, and they enjoyed these stints tremendously. Nat was the child their marriage might have produced if it had happened thirty years sooner, and the coldest, most overcast winter day warmed and brightened when Natalie came toddling in, looking like a midget version of the Goodyear blimp in her pink quilted snowsuit with the mittens hanging from the cuffs, and yelled exuberantly: "Hi, I miss! I come to bizzit you!"
In June of 1995, Helen bought a reconditioned Volvo. On the back she put a sticker which read A WOMAN NEEDS A MAN LIKE A FISH NEEDS A BICYCLE. This sentiment did not particularly surprise Ralph, either, but glimpsing that sticker always made him feel unhappy. He sometimes thought Ed's meanest legacy to his widow was summed up in its brittle, not-quite-funny sentiment, aind when he saw it, Ralph often remembered how Ed had looked on that summer afternoon when he had walked up from the Red Apple Store to confront him. How Ed had been sitting, shirtless, in the spray thrown by the sprinkler. How there had been a drop of blood on one lens of his glasses. How he had leaned forward, looking at Ralph with his earnest, intelligent eyes, and said that once stupidity reached a certain level, it became hard to live with.
And after that, stuff started to ha sometimes think. just what stuff was something he could no longer remember, though, and probably that was just as well. But his lapse of memory (if that was what it was) did not change his belief that Helen had been cheated in some obscure fashion... that some bad-tempered fate had tied a can to her tail, and she didn't even know it.
A month after Helen bought her Volvo, Faye Chapin suffered a heart-attack while drafting a preliminary list of seeds for that fall's Runway 3 Classic. He was taken to Derry Home Hospital, where he died seven hours later. Ralph visited him shortly before the end, and when he saw the numbers on the door-315-a fierce sense of deja vu washed over him. At first he thought it was because Carolyn