CHAPTER 29
On Sunday night, Kurt told me there had been an argument in priesthood between Alex Helm and Brother Rhodes over the subject of black people and the priesthood. Brother Rhodes had loudly insisted on the historical facts, which were that black men had been ordained in the early days of the church, but then the practice stopped and certain General Authorities said that it was because black skin was the “mark of Cain.” Others said that it was because blacks had been “less valiant” in the preexistence. Those General Authorities had gone silent when the 1978 revelation restored universal priesthood.
I smiled a little. “I almost wish I had been there,” I said.
“No, you don’t. When Alex Helm suggested that God had His own reasons for denying blacks the priesthood, Brother Rhodes insisted that there had never been any revelation to take priesthood from black men, that it was all just racism within the church and that Joseph Smith would have been appalled. Alex Helm nearly burst into flame, he was so incensed. He declared that he could not stay in the building with such a person, and walked out.”
“Hmm. Am I supposed to be unhappy about that result?” I asked.
“He marched into Primary and yanked Kelly out of her class. He gave a piece of his mind to the Primary Presidency while he was on his way.”
“He didn’t,” I said, my heart sinking. The Primary Presidency was a thankless job. I’d been one of the two counselors a few years ago, and in addition to the long hours spent planning programs, visiting children at home, and preparing lessons, there was also the reality that the most capable members were often used in positions other than as Primary teachers, which made staffing a constant problem.
“The three of them came to talk to me this evening, and we discussed what could be done for Kelly. But if Alex Helm stays in the home, they are going to find it difficult to contact her.”
Where was the best place for Kelly? I didn’t know anymore. Home with me? But that wasn’t even an option.
“Is there anything you would recommend the Primary Presidency try? Would you be willing to talk to them about how to work around him?”
I sighed. “I’ll think about it.”
I WAS STILL thinking when Anna Torstensen called me Wednesday of that week. She was staying in a nearby condo since the Gearys had moved back into the house, now that the police were finished with it.
“It’s definitely Helena’s body,” she said.
“Did they find dental records?”
“Yes. And a lot more than that. I don’t want to talk about it over the phone, though.”
“No, I can understand that. Do you want me to come over?”
“I’ll make some lunch,” said Anna. “We can pretend we’re just two friends having tea together.”
When I arrived, she gave me a choice between a raspberry-vanilla tea and an orange-chamomile tea. I chose the former because I was afraid the latter would make me too sleepy. I wanted to be alert for all of this.
She brought out sandwiches, tuna with cucumber on the top. They looked very fancy, and when I took a bite, I realized they tasted even better. Crisp and delicate. Even the bread was amazing. I hadn’t remembered Anna doing anything this elaborate before. The kitchen was smaller in this condo, but it had very nice equipment and was set up efficiently.
“I realized when I got back from the cruise that the last thing I wanted to do was go back to work at the bank. Full- or part-time, I had the revelation that I have a limited amount of time left in my life and since I don’t need the money anymore, I want to use it doing things that are fun. So I’ve taken up gourmet baking as a hobby. That’s homemade bread. I’m working on a few different recipes, to perfect them. And I’ve started to write a cookbook to share my secrets.”
“It’s incredible,” I said. Anna smiled at the compliment.
“So, this is what I know about her,” she said. “Helena was a convert to the church from Catholicism. Apparently her parents were very opposed to her joining what they saw as a cult. This was in the seventies, and a lot of people thought that about Mormons then. Polygamy, horns, and all that,” said Anna.
“A lot of people still think that,” I said. And I could understand it. There are things Mormons still do to make it seem like we are a cult. Secrecy about the temple. The fanatically positive view of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. Forced tithing. Talk about preparing for the end of the world. And the way we make it difficult to leave the church, even when people want to.
“Well, the police have found her brother. Her father has been dead for years.” She tapped her teacup to the table. “But the brother apparently did not want to hear anything about her, said that she was dead to the family and had been since she joined the church and married Tobias.”
“Oh, how awful,” I said. That no one cared that this woman was dead seemed worse to me almost than what Tobias had done to her.
“So when she disappeared, they didn’t notice. That was part of the reason that Tobias got away with it.”
She was assuming that Tobias had murdered his first wife now. “Didn’t she have any friends?”
“No one has come forward to talk about her. She seems to have been very quiet.” Anna sighed, and then took a sip of tea. “I suspect that was what Tobias liked about her. And apparently, it was what he looked for in me, as well.”
I was taken aback at this. “There’s nothing wrong with being quiet,” I said. I knew Anna to be more thoughtful than quiet. And not at all the kind of woman who could be easily deceived or manipulated.
She shook herself. “Maybe not.”
“Are they certain it was Tobias who killed her, then?” I asked.
“Who else could it have been?” she said, then shrugged. “Since he’s dead and there’s no one to charge, they’re not working particularly swiftly. I haven’t heard the specifics about cause of death.”
“What about how she was killed or why? Is there any hint in the papers she left?”
“A little,” said Anna. “The police say that she came into some money shortly before she disappeared. An uncle had died and left it to her. Her father took his sweet time telling the lawyers where she was living, and she was surprised about it, coming so late like that. There’s also an entry in her diary where she talks about what she wants to do with the money. She wanted to see the world on a cruise ship.” Anna gave me a pained, ironic smile.
“Ah,” I said.
“It made me wonder, when I read the entry, if Tobias had planted the idea of a cruise in my head. I don’t remember him ever talking about it, but I couldn’t help but feel—”
“Violated?” I said.
She nodded and looked down. She took a sandwich from the plate. “It might have been only a coincidence,” she said. “But I didn’t want to be the woman she should have been, just because Tobias wanted that. As expiation of some kind.”
She had been the woman Helena Torstensen might have been, as a mother for Tomas and Liam. I hoped Anna wasn’t going to pull away from them, as well. But how could she not? She would need time to recover and find her own way back to them, if she could. I hoped they would give her that time.
And then I thought of Kelly Helm, who was being molded by her grandfather into the woman he thought she should become. If she had no other women in her life but the ones who agreed with him, how would she avoid the destiny he saw for her? Someone was going to have to try to talk to Alex Helm about her, and I wasn’t sure sending in the Primary Presidency would work.
Anna looked up at me. “I feel so strange, as if I’m reinventing myself suddenly. I thought I was done with that sort of self-searching.”
I wasn’t finished with it myself. Maybe it was something that mothers had to do later in life, because we spent so much time not being ourselves, taking care of others. Or maybe it was because we were women and had worried too much about fitting the expectations of others.
“So what are Tomas and Liam saying now? Surely they can’t still believe their father is completely innocent.”
“They won’t talk about it at all,” said Anna with a small, tight smile.
“I’m sorry. I can only imagine how difficult it must be for all of you.”
“They want him to be the gentle father they loved and nothing else. Not that I blame them. I don’t know how to deal with the double image in my mind, either. It gives me a constant headache,” said Anna, touching a spot right between her eyes. “He was a good man in many ways. A part of me wants to think that he changed, rather than just believing that he fooled me for so long. But maybe that part of me just doesn’t want to deal with the truth because it’s so painful.”
“Did Helena ever write in her journal about him hurting her? Arguments? Abuse?”
Anna shook her head. “By her account, he was a marvelous husband. Attentive, kind, the same Tobias I knew. The only thing that bothered her was that he hated her family and would spend hours raving about how they would all burn in hell. He thought the Catholic church was the ‘great and abominable church’ from the Book of Mormon.”
Anna started cleaning up the tea, and I stood up to help her, though she tried to wave me back down. “According to her diary,” she went on as she worked, “Helena used to beg Tobias to pray for her family. She still loved them, even after they kicked her out of the house and refused to speak to her. She went to the temple often and prayed for them. She did work for all her ancestors she could and she wrote about feeling like a vulture, waiting for her mother and father to die so that she could seal them in the temple together, and herself and her brothers to them.”
Anna stopped for a moment, and I thought she might become tearful about the reality that she and Tobias wouldn’t be able to be sealed like this. But she must have thought better of it, because she only shook herself and went back to the dishes.
“The police gave me a copy of the diary because they thought I might be able to see things in it that they didn’t. I’ve been through it several times now.”
Only because she was looking for proof that Tobias had killed Helena? “It sounds almost as if you’ve come to like her.” Her rival, or precursor, or whatever it was that Helena was to Anna.
Anna let out a breath, nodding. “She was a good woman. I like to imagine we would have been friends. Does that sound very odd?”
“I’ve heard of stranger things,” I said. A woman in the ward was best friends with her husband’s ex, and they had met after the second marriage. “Friendships should be taken wherever they work, I think. They are rare enough things, real friendships.” It made me think about Anna and how much I wanted her to stay near.
Anna closed the dishwasher and sat back down, her visage thoughtful. “I still have a hard time understanding how he could have been so different from how he appeared. Wouldn’t he have shown some sign of violence before he killed her?”
“Maybe they argued suddenly about her family. Maybe Tobias didn’t want her to take the money,” I said. Mormon men could be very prickly about that. I had once suggested to Kurt, early on in our marriage, that I could work nights and he could watch the kids. He had objected strenuously. At first I thought it was because he was afraid of being left alone with them. It was only after weeks of teasing the truth out of him that I realized it was a blow to his pride for me to admit I thought he wasn’t earning enough money to provide well for his family.
“She loved her boys so much. She poured everything into them, and into that diary,” said Anna, her voice tight.
“Well, I’m glad there is something of her still left, after all this time. She didn’t disappear. She has been found.”
“Mmm,” said Anna. She looked out the window of the small foyer. Its only view was of the dumpster in the back of the row of condos. “And what about me? What do I leave behind? How am I to avoid disappearing in the same way she did?”
“Oh, Anna.” I reached over and put my hand over hers. “I didn’t mean it like that. Tomas and Liam are your sons, too. They are your legacy.”
“They can barely speak to me.” She sounded faded, far away.
“That’s right now. But in a year or so, you’ll figure things out.” I wanted to believe it as much as I wanted her to believe it.
Anna pulled away from me. “I wonder if that’s the only reason I want to write this cookbook. So that I leave something behind of myself. Without children, it feels like it doesn’t matter, though. It’s a poor substitute to leaving behind genes.”
I wondered how many women who had families would think that leaving behind a book would matter more, because a book was something that you shaped consciously. Children, as I had learned like all women before me, were an accidental art. The more you tried to shape them, the less shape they took. Or at least it seemed that way some days.
“In any case, I may be coming home soon. To the ward.” She tried to smile about it. “The Gearys have asked to be let out of the lease and I’m inclined to let them.”
“Well, I can’t complain about that,” I said.
“I wanted to get away from it to prove who I was, that I wasn’t just Tobias’s wife. But now that I know Helena died there, I don’t know. I feel like I want to go back. I want to be where she was,” said Anna. “I want to understand her, and me. And him.”
“Her diary has really affected you,” I said.
She raised her eyebrows. “Oh, yes. Enormously. She was a fine writer. She has a way of making me feel like even the details of life are delicious. Every dirty sock in the laundry, every burned pot that has to be scrubbed, every burned out light bulb. They all mean something to her. They are all part of her being. She really lived life, in that diary. It makes me feel even worse that her life was so short. She made so much of it.”
“You’re not doing this out of obligation to her? Because you think that you owe her because you got her sons and her husband?” I said.
“No, it’s not like that. I want to honor her for her own sake, not for her sons or for Tobias. I’ve already done everything I could to honor her in that way.”
“You don’t think God’s asking you to stay?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I’m not going to put this decision on God. I prayed about marrying Tobias, and always thought it was the right thing to do. But was it, in the end? Or was I the one who wanted to marry him so badly I didn’t listen? Or was there enough good in it that God let me make the decision I wanted? I don’t think I can trust myself on what God directs me to do anymore.”
I knew that place. Sometimes I was still in that lonely place where nothing made sense except in the most obvious way. It was hard to see anything luminous in the everyday world of pain and purpose. “Well, for purely selfish reasons, I’m glad you’re moving back closer to me,” I said.
Anna laughed. “That’s why you’re the bishop’s wife, isn’t it? You make us all feel welcome, no matter what our problems are.”
If that was true, she had just offered me the best compliment of my life. Being welcome was a good feeling, and definitely one to share.