The Penny (21 page)
Del stopped in his tracks. “You would trust me with that?”
“There are a great many things I would trust you with,” she said.
That was the moment Miss Shaw began to remove her gloves in front of Del Henry. She unfastened the tiny buttons at her wrists. She tugged off each of the fingers.
Del Henry examined her scars for a moment. It must have terrified her, how hard he looked at her hands.
Then I saw him reach for her. They walked along hand in hand, swinging their arms all the way back to the car.
I
t seemed impossible that we could have ever complained about the heat by the time Christmas rolled around. The radiator in the living room woke us clanking and rattling, trying to keep up with the winter cold. Whenever the door swung open downstairs, a blast of nippy air deluged our upstairs landing. Gone were the days of streetcar rides to Miss Shaw’s with heat shimmering along the sidewalks. Nowadays, when you stood in line for the box office at the Fox Theater, you stamped your feet to keep warm. You rubbed your hands together and huddled tighter inside your neck scarf. I could barely remember barefoot races across a street as hot as a stovetop, or a penny that lay in my palm as warm as if it had just been minted by the sun.
The style in Christmas trees tended toward the flashy and space-aged that year. In the broad front window of Sonnenfield’s, a silver-metal tree reflected red, green and blue as a spotlight twirled on the floor beneath it. A bank of television consoles, their antennas jutting like rabbit ears, broadcast the same image on a dozen different screens.
Painted letters on the glass hawked the appliances as “the perfect big-ticket gift for the perfect family holiday.” Our family already had one. I stared at the letters a long time, dreaming I had enough money to buy a television set for the Crocketts.
As for me, I didn’t need a thing. I had the best present I could ever hope for. Daddy had informed me in a magisterial voice that Jean was coming home. Her secretarial school had disgorged its students the day before, and Jean waited for hours after the building was locked and the heat was turned down before she gave up and admitted she had nowhere to go but home. Laden with her overweight typewriter case and not much else, she’d tottered to a corner phone booth and called Daddy with her Greyhound Bus schedule. He told us all this with a know-it-all smile, like he’d just won the King Solomon Award for Brilliance for figuring out how things would turn out in the end.
When Mama heard the news, she looked afraid to move. At first I thought she didn’t hear. One of her favorite Christmas ornaments had come from Woolworth’s, a purple ball so big around, with glass so thin that Mama breathed a sigh of relief every time Daddy brought the decorations down and she found it still in one piece. After Daddy told us that Jean called, Mama stared at our purple ball for the longest time, touching the upraised, iced letters that read
Silent Night, Holy Night,
turning the ball in her hand.
My sister was coming home for Christmas.
Just as I turned from the TVs in the shop window, intending to head up the sidewalk and finish my meager shopping, something made me turn back. I recognized the man’s face on the screen, although at first, I had trouble placing him.
Only one or two sets had the sound turned up. Window glass muffled what the reporters were saying, but if I stood close, I could hear. A swarm of microphones danced before his mouth, their call letters all but obliterating his face. Newsmen aimed questions at him the same way they’d throw darts in an arcade.
“Is it true that you have announced to your countrymen that you’re ready to be married?”
“No comment,” he said.
“Is it true you’ve been corresponding with Grace Kelly since you met at the
Paris Match
photo shoot in Monaco? When she led the U.S. delegation at Cannes?”
“No comment,” he said.
Prince Rainier of Monaco.
“If you’ve come to find a bride and it isn’t Grace, what sort of woman would you be looking for?”
“I’m sorry.” A gentleman escort stepped in front of the microphones, propelling the prince to one side. “His Royal Highness will answer no more questions at this time.” Which seemed to give the news hounds permission to lob queries at him double-time, as he tried to duck away.
“If you’ve never traveled to America before, then why now?”
“If this is only a regular holiday, why would you travel with a priest and a doctor?”
“If you are coming to America to sight-see, then why are you only going to Philadelphia?”
Just what we need,
I thought to myself.
Jean is finally coming home, and she’ll hear about this, and I’ll have to listen to Grace Kelly stories all over again. She’ll go bats and I won’t be able to stand it.
I didn’t care how much Jean went on about Grace Kelly, though, not really, I admitted to myself, because I was so excited that my sister and I would be together. Not until I grew much older would it strike me that my enthusiasm over Jean’s return could’ve been seen as selfish. While I was rejoicing because I wouldn’t be alone with Daddy anymore, my sister was facing the fact that she didn’t have any safe place to go.
Certain fragrances, certain songs, never fail to bring back the day she returned to me. I see it as if I’m opening a book and flipping through each page, seeing every detail. The naked branches of the maple tree that reached out over the street like gnarled fingers. The low rise of clouds moving through our neighborhood in a cresting wave. Daddy commenting as he stood on the landing that we might get snow. The musty smell of our flat mixed with the scent of pine boughs from the Christmas tree inside. I can still see the smugness in Daddy’s eyes as he headed out to the car to go get Jean. My sister coming home, even for a few weeks, meant he’d be in charge of her, and that thrilled him. The minute she set one foot in the door, he’d have control of her again.
Mama and I waited at the top of the landing until we heard the car pull up at the curb. Mama flew down the stairs to meet them, running like a girl the same age as me. We made it down to the yard before Daddy cut the engine.
The passenger door shot open, and in those first few precious seconds, Jean leapt upon us, hugging us and laughing. A good number of neighbors braved the chilly air to poke out their heads and find out what all the ruckus was about. Mr. Patterson stepped out on the little hillock that was our yard to wish us a merry Christmas, and Mrs. Shipley brought her baby out so Jean could see it toddle around the stiff, dead grass.
Mrs. Patterson had taken it upon herself to hang a wreath on our communal front door, with bouquets of pinecones and tiny red berries and gold plastic letters that read SEASON’S GREETINGS. Jean stepped back from the breathtaking squeeze she gave me, eyed me from the top of my head to the tips of my toes, and said something remarkably adult-like.
“Who’d have thought you’d grow so much while I was gone? You’ve shot up like a weed.”
It wasn’t like I had anything to do with that. What did a person say?
Thank you?
“Well, I’ve been trying.” Then I remembered she must’ve just celebrated her eighteenth birthday. She’d done it without us. She’d done it alone.
For those minutes, as we fought over who was going to lug Jean’s typewriter case upstairs and who was going to get her suitcase and who got to tote her blue-and-white cosmetic case to her room, you would have thought we were welcoming Grace Kelly herself into our upstairs flat. Mama had cooked Jean’s favorite custard, and she’d bought Red Hots to put inside baked apples for dessert on Christmas Day.
Once Jean’s luggage had been set in her room, it seemed like she’d never been gone. At first my sister prowled the kitchen in her sullen, stealthy way, like a tiger prowling the perimeter of its cage. In the days leading up to her arrival, I had pictured those first hugs in the yard and the suitcases banging against the wall as we carried them up the stairwell smiling at each other. I had not imagined how our house would feel after time had passed and we all fell silent and tense again.
Mama chirrupped like a squirrel every time Jean stalked into the kitchen, jabbering desperately about topics she thought Jean might be interested in.
“Did you know the Stinnetts sold an old hobby horse at their yard sale?”
“I read in the social section of the
Post-Dispatch
how popular it is for the Forest Park people to have hobo parties. Everyone drives to a different house for a different dinner course.”
“Did you know Donna Johnson has gotten herself entered in the Miss Missouri contest? How she did that, I do not know.”
Jean stared at Mama like she was jabbering in a different language, and left the kitchen.
Seeing Jean’s discomfort left me feeling awkward and shy. Maybe I didn’t know this person who’d returned to my house anymore. I followed her to her room where she began rummaging through her suitcase.
“Did you hear about it on the television news?” I asked, realizing this might bridge the distance between us.
“What?”
“Prince Rainier.”
“I
did
hear it.” She brightened. “He’s spending Christmas in Philadelphia.”
I couldn’t believe it myself. For the first time in my life, I was
trying
to make Jean talk about Grace Kelly. Always before, when she brought it up, I wanted to stuff a mop in her mouth.
“What do you think it means?” I asked innocently.
“I think he’s sweet on her.”
“Do you think he’ll propose?” I asked.
“I sure think it’s possible,” she said.
My sister began to pace again—from the bed to the dresser that I thought she’d never use again to the window where she could see into the street, the bedraggled flats decorated half-heartedly for Christmas. The third time she reached the window, she started drumming her fingers on the sill. She stopped abruptly when we heard the sound of singing in the street below. Christmas carolers.
If those singers had come this far south in our neighborhood, they hadn’t just set out on a social occasion. Residents along Wyoming Street weren’t the sort to invite strangers inside for hot chocolate or fudge or candy canes. The carolers would be lucky if they could entice anyone to come into the stairwell and open the main front door. But someone from downstairs, either the Pattersons or the Shipleys, must have taken pity on them because, next thing we knew, the words lofted up the stairs just as robust as the December evening air.
Jean returned to her dresser and started moving her bottles of perfume and face cleaner and box of talcum powder around. Finally she blurted out, “I didn’t come back here for help. I just didn’t have any other place to go.”
The words that wafted up to us from downstairs were the same as the ones on Mama’s precious glass ornament from Woolworth’s.
Silent Night.
Outside, as cars drove past, the road crackled from the cold.
“What’s it like, getting away?” I asked.
My sister jerked her head up in surprise. “Getting away from what?”
“You know. Getting away from Daddy. Being on your own. Having friends come see you without worrying. Getting to
know
everyone. Getting to make up your own mind about things.”
“Oh. Oh, yes. It’s fine. Really fine.” Her answer came much too quickly.
“Well, I’ve gotten to know plenty.” I launched into a long diatribe about Miss Shaw and how she’d finally let out all her secrets, and about the portables and saving Garland and everything that had happened with Aurelia.
“The only thing I’m getting to know is how to type f j f j f j f j with a blindfold tied on my eyes.” Jean’s voice held a sense of irony that I didn’t understand. “Then, after that, we added the d’s and the k’s.” She paused. “It’s not as easy getting to know the other girls as you’d think it’d be.”
“Why not?”
She used the tip of one fingernail, much longer and more glamorous than it had ever been before she left us, to worry the cuticle on her thumb. The tips of her nails were so clean, I knew she’d used Nail White. It seemed like an eternity before she would answer. “Oh, I don’t know. They talk about things I don’t care about much. Going on vacations with friends. Their mamas giving them advice about boys. How their daddies used to take them to the country club and catch them in their arms when they jumped in swimming. If Daddy tried to catch me when I was swimming, I’d go the other way. See—just . . .
things.
Things it’s impossible for me to talk about.” Then, “I don’t think they like me very much.”
I waited, my heart scrunching into a fist of longing, just waiting for her to acknowledge that it was nice for her and me to be together. When my sister finally lost interest in her thumbnail, she glanced up at me like she didn’t much care for what she saw.
“Aren’t you even glad to see me?” I asked.
“Yes.” She said as if she found it extremely regrettable, “I am very glad to see you.”
“Well.” I stood straighter. “That’s something.”
“There’s no way out, really, is there?”
“No way out of what?” I asked.
“This house. What Daddy does to us,” she said. “You can’t run away from it. It follows you every place you go.”
W
hen you grow up in a family like mine, you learn early what
not
to expect during Christmastime. You don’t expect dolls wearing ruffled dresses and real jewelry. You don’t expect any glittering fineries from Sonnenfield’s window. You don’t expect those television family moments where the daddy puts the star on top of the tree and the mama hugs him, admiring him for his general prowess while the sisters wait expectantly, knowing that this night-of-all-nights will bring only good things.
Our Christmas morning celebration the next day would be as short-lived as my reveling when Jean had stepped from the Packard automobile, followed by an isolated, simple dinner with turkey and Mama’s peeled apples, which baked up astonishingly red because she put Red Hot candies in them. After that, Daddy would make his sullen retreat to the front stoop for his next beer and cigarette, his resentful insistence that this celebration-nonsense ought not last any longer than it had to.
I ached to get to Antioch Baptist Church for the Christmas Eve service Aurelia had told me about, where Christmas songs sung gospel-style came out richer and sweeter than Brer Rabbit Molasses and the velvet glow caught from one worshiper’s candle to another until everybody’s faces shone with a soft glimmering light that made even the most unsightly beautiful. Reverend Monroe would stand in the pulpit in front of everyone, a man I knew to be soft-spoken and gentle, a man I knew held me in high esteem, and he would bellow with the muscle of the Lord: “Even if God should send suffering and loss, I will still rejoice in my Savior! Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD! I will be joyful in God my Savior!”
I’d come up with a plan and was so sure of it, I’d even brought it up with Miss Shaw when I’d worked at the shop last Saturday. Although she usually attended Christmas Eve service at the community church that stood catty-corner to the cemetery, she said, “I can’t think of a way I’d rather observe Christmas, Jenny, I really can’t. And I hope you won’t mind if I ask Delbert Henry to join us?”
I was so sure of my plan that after I dressed in my best skirt and velvet shoes, I knocked on Jean’s door. She asked, “Where are you going all dressed up?”
“If you hurry, you can come with me.” I had every intention of bringing my sister along and introducing her to everyone I’d been jabbering about.
Jean scratched her leg, and I could tell she wasn’t too keen on wearing itchy stockings that day.
“I don’t know.”
“It won’t be so bad, Jean. Just don’t wear clothes that make you scratch. Don’t wear the skirt with the net petticoat. Once you hear what the preacher talks about, you’ll forget all about how your dress feels. Besides, there’ll be
candles.
There’ll be a baby up front, the Trouppes’ baby, Aurelia says, sleeping on a bed of real hay.”
I think I had her convinced right after I finished the part about the candles. Jean shrugged into her slip, situated her skirt properly, and buttoned it around her waist. She tugged a black turtleneck sweater over her head and slipped her arms into raglan sleeves. As she reached up to fasten her pearls at her neck and brush her hair, I thought she looked about ten years older than she’d looked fifteen minutes ago. She brushed her hair to a fine sheen that mine never would have achieved, even if it
did
have any length to it.
The tart smell of apples filled our flat. Mama stood at the kitchen counter, peeling more apples with a paring knife.
I had my money stashed safely inside my velvet purse for the streetcar. “We’re headed out for a few minutes,” I said.
“Don’t be long,” she tossed back. “You girls stay out of trouble.” Then, as if one might have something to do with the other, “Don’t let your father catch you.” Just as our feet started clattering down the stairwell, Daddy stepped inside the downstairs door in front of us.
“Where do you two think you’re going?”
I caught Jean’s arm and wouldn’t let her go farther.
“It’s Christmas, Daddy. We want to go to church.”
“With your mama slaving away, trying to get ready for tomorrow? I don’t think so.”
It had been a long time since he’d worried about Mama slaving over anything. “She told us we could go out,” I challenged him.
Jean backed up another step in spite of me holding her arm.
“It’s okay, Jenny,” she said. “We don’t have to do it.”
“You can’t stop us,” I said to him while I still had the courage.
That’s when he cursed and shouted,
“You just
think
I can’t.” He’d backed Jean all the way to the landing, but I held my ground two steps in front of her. Daddy made his stand in front of me with his arms crossed, his biceps flexing as big as two hams.
“Who wants to be first?” he asked, suddenly swinging his arms back and forth as if he were a football linebacker. “I said,
Who wants to be first?
Who wants me to
take them down
?”
Daddy could have tossed me down the steps just as easy as he could have tossed a sack of cotton. Still, if it had just been me, I would have fought for it. But I was thinking of Jean. I was thinking of keeping things tranquil in our house until she could get away again. I was thinking of the pew that wouldn’t be full, of the heads that would keep turning and looking for us, as I yielded and backed up the stairs myself. Only later did I realize I’d been the sister standing in the most precarious position.
The next morning, we each unwrapped a new pair of stockings and a new toothbrush and a bottle of Prince Matchabelli cologne that Mama had bought for us. She had signed Daddy’s name to the tags, too, and we thanked them both with polite but careful smiles. As for me, I was glad to have new stockings. Mine had a run in them, from the ankle bone all the way up. I’d been relegated to bobby socks until my next paycheck came.
Jean must have saved up good from her summer baby-sitting, because when I tore open the little box from her, I found a pair of pearl earrings.
“They’ll hurt your ears,” she whispered when I hugged her. “I have a pair like them. But they shine real pretty.”
Stashed in a glass vase upstairs was the bright purple flower Aurelia had made me out of sheets of crepe paper. Out of all of us, Aurelia had been the one most excited about Christmas. She’d escorted me into her room days ago and whispered in low tones and carefully opened sacks to show me what she planned to give everyone.
She’d made all her best friends flowers, and she’d bought a new magnifying glass for Darnell. She’d bought a toy spaceship for Garland and a set of spatulas for Aunt Maureen.
Of all the things she’d purchased, though, she was most excited about what she’d gotten her daddy. She’d gone to Chesworth’s Music and bought Eddie Crockett sheet music, a vast assortment of it.
I knew he couldn’t play that without the aid of Mr. Lamoretti. Never mind his arm. “You must be crazy giving him that,” I said, hands planted on my hips.
“He likes to have it setting around the house, Jenny,” she assured me. “He wants T. Bone and Curtis and Chick to see it everywhere they go when they roam around here.”
I shook my head.
“He likes to think about what he’s going to do someday. It’s more for his spirit than anything.” As if that explained it all. And the more I thought about it, it did. It was just like Eddie Crockett. He liked to show everybody he was going to live his life whole even if a part of it had gotten broken.
I waited until last to give out my presents. I had spent hours at Miss Shaw’s because she’d insisted I use the shop’s wrapping paper for each of the small dimestore gifts I’d bought my family. When I pulled my packages out, we didn’t have anything left under the tree.
“Here, Mama.” I handed hers over and watched while she unwrapped a box of soaps. I’d known she’d “ooh” and “ah” over the Yardley Lilac fragrance.They smelled like the lilacs she snipped from our neighbor’s yard and snuck into the house every June. (“You want to steal the lilacs off your neighbor’s tree,” she’d say each year as she flitted upstairs still wearing her nylon bathrobe, clutching armfuls of blooms she’d cut with the kitchen scissors, “the best way to do it is in your nightgown. That way, nobody ever gets brave enough to stop you.”)
Next Jean unwrapped the eyelash curler I’d bought her from Woolworth’s, exactly like the one Miss Shaw had given me clear directions on how to employ. Jean was the one who could use eyelash-curler lessons now. I fully intended to take her through every step and send her back to secretarial school in total awe of me because I’d taught her to have the fashionable wide-eyed look.
When I handed Daddy his small box, I couldn’t keep my hand from shaking. I held my breath while he sliced the tape with his pocketknife and smoothed out each crease with his thumb. He lifted the lid off the box and frowned. My heart pounded like drumfire in my chest.
Daddy picked it up. “What’s this—a penny? This is all you gave me for Christmas?”
I questioned the decision again in my head:
Lord, did I really hear you right? Isn’t this what you wanted me to do?
“Last summer I found a penny like this one, Daddy. And God used it to remind me how he wanted to change my life.” Then to my total surprise, out of my mouth came, “Maybe you don’t understand what you’ve been doing to us, Daddy.” I took a deep breath, mustering all my courage. “But without God intervening, my life would have been ruined.”
He went on talking as if he didn’t even hear me. “You have a job, for Pete’s sake,” he said. “You could have gotten me a new cigarette lighter. Now
that,
I needed.”
It made me cringe, but I touched his hand.
“No, Daddy.” My voice came out just as strong and firm as I could make it. “
This
is what you need.”
I told him the penny was important because it represented God’s truth.
“It started something new in me, Daddy. I’m hoping it might get you started on the same road.” I looked down at my shoes. “You probably hurt Jean and me, Daddy, because somebody hurt you. I’m giving you this penny in hopes that you’ll let God change you, too.”
Daddy looked at me like what I’d just said had blown a hole in his gut. The air in the room was thick with fear and anticipation. He set the penny in its small box beneath the tree, barely touching it, like it might burn him.
The penny sat there in its box until Mama took the tree down and folded up the quilted tree skirt. The penny sat there until the day the Grace Kelly stories started on television again.
From the minute Grace Kelly announced her engagement to Prince Rainier III, my sister acted like she’d personally been invited into a world of royalty. The announcement came in a special NBC news report right after the week’s presentation of
The Philco Television Playhouse.
Jean watched the story unfold on television that week, mesmerized, unable to turn away.
“There is nothing impetuous about this proposal,” Rainier repeated a dozen times into as many microphones as news correspondents hounded him for the story. “I think we are both ready for marriage.”
When the reporters grilled Grace Kelly’s mother for her part of the story, she beamed at the cameras.
“I knew then and there that his intentions were not just those of a smitten young man.” Mrs. Kelly spoke of her daughter with such pride that it made me want to cry. “There was purpose in every word and movement.”
“I am swept away,” Grace announced in her practiced diction, as camera bulbs exploded in her face and she never batted an eyelid. “I have been in love before, but never like this.”
“Can you
imagine
?” Jean breathed. “Marrying a real
prince
?”
“It’s hard to picture,” I admitted. “Living in a castle. Having everything done up just the way you like it. . . .”
Most nights while Jean was home from Lowman’s Secretarial School, she and I slept in the same bed. Most nights I’d give a light tap on her door, tactfully offering her a chance not to hear me. But she always heard me; she always guessed I might be coming. She left the door open a crack so I could push it open. And we’d lay side-by-side in amiable silence, our chests rising and falling to the same tempo, our pillows bunched up beneath our ears, our legs ending up tangled by morning. If either of us got up and leaned over the windowsill, we could see Daddy below on the stoop, in one of his regular foul moods, the tip of his Lucky Strike glowing red every time he took a draw on it. The air on those few nights seemed clear as watch-face glass with my sister at my side, quiet and intensified. Even from the bed I could almost hear Daddy sucking on his cigarette, releasing it with a
pop.
Since Christmas, Daddy’s mood had grown more sullen. I kept waiting for a response from him about what I’d given him as a gift, but none came.
Sometimes Jean would say, “I hate to go leaving you again.”
And I’d say, “I saw Billy Manning dust-bombing streetcars. He’s a real pest.”
She’d ask, “You going to be all right, Jenny?”
I’d whisper, “I think so. Yeah, I’m going to be okay.”
That night, because Grace Kelly had announced her engagement to a prince, I happened to think of a page from an issue of
Movie Reel
I’d brought home from Miss Shaw’s and saved for Jean.
“It’s a real good story,” I told her. “All about Grace’s parents being unhappy with her dating Oleg Cassini. I thought you’d like to read it, but maybe you wouldn’t. None of it matters anymore.”
“Oh, go get it,” she said, bopping my shoulder. “I want to read it. I really
do.
”
On hands and knees, I dug through my clothes until I found the bottom of the drawer. Just as my hand found the slick, thin pages, I froze. My stomach wrenched.
Daddy’s footsteps moved toward me in the hallway. The floor creaked. I heard him take another step, measuring his weight by degrees.
I felt like I would be sick.
Help me, please, Jesus. Don’t let it happen again.
