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. They also develop a shared interest in chamber music and begin hosting exclusive recitals, during which they experience a rare approximation of intimacy: “[O]n these occasions, they could be together, in silence, sharing emotions for which they were not responsible and which did not refer directly to the two of them” (66).

Rask profits immensely from the crash of 1929. Anticipating the crash, he liquidates his positions, buys gold, and shorts the market. The media accuse Rask of rigging the crash: In the preceding boom years, Rask created attractive loans for working people eager to share in the economy’s prosperity. At the same time, millions of first-time investors began trading on margin—buying stocks with borrowed money while using those same stocks as collateral. This inflated a giant bubble of speculation. Wall Street deifies Rask in large part because of the apparent omniscience of his trades: Without current information from the stock ticker—which fell hours behind reality during large buy-and-sell orders—Rask was still able to make profitable trades.

Though Rask becomes a god in finance, he becomes a pariah in society, costing Helen her friendships in the art world. Helen—racked by guilt over her husband’s role in the crisis—throws herself into philanthropy aimed at helping those hit hardest by the crash. In contrast, Rask is unmoved by the Depression and sees the crash as a healthy correction to the market.

Helen’s mental health begins to deteriorate, which she hides from Rask. She worries she has the same mental illness that destroyed her father. Like her father, she begins keeping extensive journals of her increasingly obsessive, ingrown thoughts. After Helen locks herself in her room and stops eating, Rask notices her condition and intervenes. He finds her covered in eczema, bleeding from her incessant scratching. He calls Catherine, who hasn’t talked to Helen in a year. The tragedy of her daughter’s illness excites the histrionic Catherine, who rushes over to see her. Helen stands in her room waiting with a note directing Catherine to take her to the psychiatric hospital in Bad Pfäfers: “I smelled your scent. I heard your strut. Medico-Mechanic Institute. You shall deposit me in Switzerland” (89).