Trust

In her marriage to Rask, Helen finds the freedom she longed for under her parents. She and Rask share a courteous yet distant intellectual disposition, making for a harmonious, though dispassionate, marriage. Helen’s personality befits her new social status—while people previously saw her silence as arrogance, they now see it as stately remove. Rask continues to trade with a prescience and skill that awes Wall Street.

After World War I ends, Helen learns that her father disappeared from the psychiatric hospital shortly after he arrived years prior. Rask has investigators search Europe for Leopold, to no avail. Helen is devastated. Meanwhile, Catherine holds countless parties, all billed to Rask. Helen sees an ulterior motive in these celebrations, “a festive sort of aggression directed straight at Helen both as a dare and as a lesson—‘This is the life you should be living’” (63). Instead of becoming a socialite, Helen throws herself into the intellectual world of the arts, becoming a patron to many emerging artists.

Helen’s greatest passion is funding research of mental illness. Rask owns a stake in a German company pioneering psychiatric research, Haber Pharmaceuticals. Helen and Rask bond over this shared interest, admiring each other’s ability to quickly learn to read technical psychiatric papers.