Word: lydia
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Helen Walsh was pretty, sensitive and warmhearted, and her sister Lydia, seven years older, was watchful, forthright and kind. Hackettston, Conn., where they lived with 9,174 other people much like themselves, was a quiet, ordinary, clean and well-kept town. George Peterson, who married Helen, was a solid businessman who flushed uncomfortably when he admitted his philosophy of life: "It's worth something just to hear the machines going till 5 o'clock again...
...small-town life in the dreary '30s, with a glance over the shoulder at Europe. The book is unique among U.S. first novels in that it is strictly a novel of character. So carefully does the author outline each feature in her pictures of Helen, George and Lydia that the book takes on the quality of a preserved family parlor with portraits by Sargent on the walls...
Surf in Her Head. The best feature of The Walsh Girls is its superb characterization of Lydia. Reaching her 40th birthday in the summer of 1935, teacher of high-school English to classes that were now filled with the children of her old school mates, neat, precise, churchgoing, independent, heartbreakingly lonely, she lived alone in the mansion she inherited, an exemplification of the remoteness of the culture she taught from the stirring life around her. Each morning she put on her black hat with a feather on it, her scarf, galoshes, sweater and coat, and went to her class...
...Bank. When George and Helen returned from their Florida honey moon, Lydia was trying to remember that the mortgage was due on the old Walsh home. She sat at her desk by the window and wrote down, "Bank account: $68.03." The Brazilian bonds she had bought for $3,600 were now worth $313.64. She owed two quarters payment on the principal, plus $150 and interest: at least $750. She talked stiffly to the banker, whose bank had recently passed quietly into the hands of a Boston firm, to her new brother-in-law, who had spent more than he could...
...LYDIA M. REEDER Columbus, Ohio...