Their mother taught piano lessons in the house, and all of the children went through the lessons as well. One shapeless weekend afternoon as Helen was trudging through “To a Wild Rose” on the upright, she started trying to figure out the jingle from the Alka-Seltzer commercial, and soon she had the little up-and-over tune. She heard Isaac and Anne laugh from the kitchen. The house breathed. Her father’s footsteps came to the threshold behind her, and Helen decided to sing out “plop plop, fizz fizz, oh, what a relief it is” and she heard her father laugh too, and the pleasure of hearing his laugh traveled up and down her body.

She came to the end of the jingle, and even though she was a little tired of it, she started again. But her father said, “Let’s come back to substance, Helen.”

So then to meet Harry, who loved her exactly for this kind of playfulness. Harry had joked about practicing his handshake before she took him home, making it the world’s firmest just for her. His giving smile had almost never failed to bring people over to him, but her father was as closed to Harry as he was to the Pritchard boys: letting them taste how it would feel if people didn’t defer to their money.

As adults the siblings had dispersed, moving far away from that substance. Every so often she talked with her sister Anne, a nurse in Florida, and they laughed that, of all of them, Helen had stayed closest to home.

But even after she was free of her father’s judgment, she still carried the vague wish that Harry’s wealth were a more direct reward for something he had done himself. It would have pleased her if he had been an inventor who had created a thing everyone needed. When she thought of that it made her wince at her own naïveté.

Eventually Harry’s first investing successes began to feel like failures when the companies he had cashed out of went on to multiply in size. He had made almost twenty percent on each deal, but what if he had held on? And so he began to hold for a little too long. But this impulse was tempered by his business partner, and they did more than well enough for what seemed like a long time. And then his partner left.