Family Album 4

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Helen Mae White Lennon ( ? – 1970’s)

Aunt Helen was Uncle Frank’s first wife. She herself said that she was a great beauty when she married my uncle Frank. She dropped that bit of history, along with other tidbits one summer afternoon when she did an uncharacteristic thing by coming from her house next door to our house, sit outside and talk awhile with Daddy while he barbequed. I stayed still as a mouse so as to not miss a word as Aunt Helen recounted her escapades with Uncle Frank before they got married. Seems that there was some hanky-panky going on with Uncle Frank visiting her dorm room (she was a nursing student and he a doctoring student). That blew me away. I just couldn’t picture them together—roly-poly Aunt Helen and staid, passive Uncle Frank. Later on, I saw a photo (not the one posted here) picturing a very young Aunt Helen and she was, indeed, beautiful. The way Aunt Helen told it, she seduced Uncle Frank into marriage. She wasn’t preggers or anything, just made herself so irresistible that Uncle Frank was bound and determined to have her.

Aunt Helen was a drama queen, and an alcoholic. While she was alive, I really, really disliked her. Not because she was an alcoholic—or a drama queen. Really, it was because she always had a sneer about her. As if looking at you down her nose. As if you didn’t measure up. And worse, because you didn’t measure up, you became fair game for her to make fun of. Somebody for her to point at and laugh about. You know the kind that titters behind her hands with the others in her group. For sure, she liked to read you…up close and personal. But she had nerve, I’ll give her that. And she never lost it. Not even when Uncle Frank—tiring of her drinking, the endless parties in her kitchen, and her amorous escapades—finally threw her out. After which, the story goes, she found another man to marry that she thought had some money. Which she didn’t. And he thought she had some money. Well, turned out neither one had a crying dime. When Aunt Helen found out the truth, she divorced him faster than a New York minute. This, of course, was Aunt Helen’s version of what happened as she narrated it to me and Daddy the last time I ever saw her. She ended up living out her days in very modest circumstances, compared to the way she’d lived before. It didn’t humble her. She was a hellcat to the very end.