The Penny (14 page)

Then, “Is he doing it to you, Jenny? Did he keep his promise to me?”

I stood and stared at her in awe. It took long, precious seconds for the realization to sink in: Jean had tried to give herself for me.

Maybe Miss Shaw had been right; maybe things weren’t always what they looked like. All this time when I’d thought I didn’t amount to anything in Jean’s eyes, my sister had been trying to take care of me.

I hated to tell her, but I couldn’t hold it back. “I guess Daddy doesn’t keep many bargains.”

Her face crumpled like a paper bag.

“You got to go soon. You’ll miss your bus.”

She let go of my hands, and the next thing I knew, pedal pushers were somersaulting through the air toward me. “Fold those, okay? And you can stick those socks in that overnight bag, too.”

Not until she’d zipped up the last suitcase and filled the last cardboard box did she glance in my direction again. “Jenny?”

“Yeah?”

“All those things I said—how I told you I wished you’d never been born? How I told you I hated you?”

“You can’t expect her to be interested in everything you’re interested in anymore,”
Mama had said when I asked if she knew why Jean and I were drifting apart, if she knew why Jean treated me the way she did.
When girls grow up, they start needing time to themselves.

“It didn’t matter what you said,” I lied.

“All those times I quit talking to you.”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“I couldn’t stop thinking—if you hadn’t been born, I wouldn’t have had to worry about you getting hurt, too.”

I found another pair of socks under the bed and gave them to her.

“I couldn’t stop thinking I should have been able to do something to protect you.”

Those last few minutes I bustled around Jean’s room in a bittersweet fog. After today I’d be alone with Mama and Daddy, but that didn’t matter right now. What mattered was this: I’d thought I lost Jean a long time ago, but I hadn’t.

Jean had to chase Mrs. Patterson and Miss Miner off the party line so she could call for a Yellow Cab.

“If you need money to get there, I’ll give you everything I made this summer,” I volunteered.

“You keep your money.” Her voice relapsed to its huffy tone. She’d turned snotty on me again, and this time I understood she did it because it was the only way to keep a safe distance, now that we were saying good-bye. “I got some saved up.”

She toted everything downstairs to wait for the taxi. Every time she opened the door, the wind blasted her skirt around her legs. Every time she came back inside, her hair looked like somebody had taken an eggbeater to it.

I lugged her record player down for her and set it beside the cardboard boxes with the records. When the taxi honked its horn, I ran to help the driver load the trunk for her. The wind plastered Mama’s blouse to her chest. She wrapped both arms around her middle like she thought the wind wanted to rip the blouse completely off. Even from where she waited at the porch railing, gusts blew her hair sideways and she could hardly open her eyes in the blowing dust. The Shipleys came out to wave Jean off. No telling where Daddy had gone to.

“Good-bye,” Jean called to everyone. “Good-bye,” over and over again. I’d never seen my sister so happy as when her cab pulled away. “Write,” she mouthed to me through the glass.

“I will,” I mouthed back. I couldn’t stop waving, even after the Yellow Cab started creeping up the hill. I held on to my own shirt then, too.

Shards of brick lay in the grass at my feet. Dirt pellets and tiny rocks pelted my legs as I waited at the curb and waved my sister off. I jumped around to keep them from hitting me so hard.

Oh, how I’d dreaded this moment when Jean would leave us for good.

I braced myself against the wind, letting the air-bound dust and pebbles sting my legs. I couldn’t bear the thought of going inside.

The time had come when I had to face life with Daddy alone.

Chapter Sixteen

E
verywhere except on the thermometer, the hottest-summer-on-record seemed to be fading from its own heat. “Back-to-School Togs for the Fine Men and Women of Tomorrow!” the
Post-Dispatch
advertisement blared as I read it across the streetcar aisle. “Petticoats! The Perfect Autumn Accessory for Your Newest Dark Cotton Frocks!”

As the trolley made its regular jog to the south between Sarah Street and Delmar, I pressed my nose to the open window, thinking I was going to die before it ever cooled off. We passed a red Pontiac convertible crouching on the side of the road, overflowing with young people. Maroon and gold crepe-paper streamed from the antenna. The colors of Jean’s school: Central High. In another year that school would be mine.

The streetcar clanged its bell, and tires squealed as the driver floored the red Pontiac, smoke pouring from the pavement. The teen girls screamed from their perch on the back and hung on to each other as the car took off. The driver looked sideways then forward, sideways then forward, his tongue clamped between his teeth, as he pulled abreast of us. Two boys in the front seat twirled shopping bags in the air, the girls egging them on as they aimed and let the bags fly.

When the bags sailed in through our windows, they exploded in clouds of dust. Babies screamed. Flying dirt seared my nostrils and stung my eyes. Women coughed and tried to fan some of it out the windows. Businessmen brushed off their suits and shook dust out of their newspaper pages. The conductor swatted at the clouds of dust with his hat. The woman beside me tried to wipe off her glasses.

The car sped beside us, the girls shrieking with hilarity. I wondered what we must look like to them as we jumped and fanned and complained inside the trolley, trying to get away from the dirt.

“Hey, Billy!” I heard one of the girls holler as she leaned forward and grabbed the driver by the neck. “What time’s the next one come along?”

“Any minute, sweetie,” he bellowed back. “Don’t be in such a hurry. Enjoy this one. Look at all those people in there.”

The girl positioned her chin atop his shoulder.

Just then the streetcar slowed. With both hands, I lifted myself until I was standing inside the open window.

“Billy Manning!” I screeched, and it surprised me plenty that my voice carried so far. After the tales Jean had told me, I knew without a doubt which boy would partake in
this
activity. And I recognized him from the night he’d come tumbling into Jean’s window. “Billy!” I shouted.
“Billy!”

He turned and looked my way, dislodging the head of the glamour girl who tried to stay plastered against him.

“I’m Jean’s sister!” I shouted louder, leaning out the window and waving frantically. “I’m
Jean’s sister
!” I declared to passing cars and pedestrians along the Hodiamont right-of-way and the passengers in the convertible flying Central’s official colors. My whole being wanted to jump out and join them, they were so carefree.

“Oh,” Billy shouted. “Oh, hi!”

“Hey,” the girl slapped him on the shoulder. I’ll bet she asked, “Who’s Jean?”

And then they were gone. They zoomed past. We were forgotten, the next trolley targeted. Still I hung out the window, calling after them. I called to the skyline of St. Louis and beyond.

“I’m Jean’s sister!”

Because calling out her name like that was the only way I could give credit to her, the only way I could make sense of the horrible bargain she had wrought with Daddy, trying to protect me. Jean and I belonged to each other. All those years I’d thought I was on my own. But now I knew my sister cared about me after all.

I couldn’t have guessed how much I’d miss Jean after she’d gone. Every time I walked into the house, I expected her sullen voice. Every time I passed her room, I expected her judgmental glance.

Only now that I knew what had elicited her ill-temper, her absence left a gaping hole in my chest. I felt so lonely sometimes without Jean and Aurelia, I thought I might die. Whenever Jean phoned us, which wasn’t too often, I hung onto the receiver with both hands as if I were hanging onto my sister instead.

The details of my sister’s new life sounded spectacular, and I’ll bet even Mrs. Patterson was listening in. Jean had taken a Saturday job at a dress shop to make spending money. Every day at school they had timed drills in typing, and yesterday she’d clocked in at 47 words a minute with only two mistakes. Her roommate, Sarah, had spent a week in Chicago once, and now Jean thought she might look for a job in Chicago after she got her typing certificate.

Running across magazine articles about Grace Kelly or hearing reports about her on television made me feel worse than ever. Every time I heard Grace Kelly’s name, it reminded me that Jean wasn’t around to share movie-star stories with me. I started gobbling up the gossip magazines by myself instead, knowing the words would make me feel twice as alone when I read them, but reading them anyway. That’s how I grieved my sister’s leaving, I hung onto the details of Grace Kelly’s life the same way I would have left my feet planted too long on the searing pavement, knowing the hurt would be there, waiting for it to start soaking through.

When I picked up the party line to listen in one afternoon, I caught Mrs. Patterson in the throes of a conversation with Miss Mona about asking Daddy if he’d be willing to refurbish her scratched floors. She ran through at least three piqued imitations of my father.

“He said, ‘Now those aren’t my floors to worry about, are they?’ Can you
believe
he said that, Mona? ‘I’m not the one who has to walk on them.’ He said, ‘If you fix those floors yourself and make them all nice, I’ll have to raise the rent on you.’ Can you
believe
it?”

On the other end, I heard Miss Mona Miner laugh occasionally during this tirade. “Some people like to control everything, Lily. Just feel sorry for that man’s family.”

“I know,” Mrs. Patterson said. “Can you
imagine
?”

Listening in on the party line was yet another activity that kept me feeling closer to Jean. Just as I reached to silently disconnect myself—this certainly wasn’t a topic I hadn’t eavesdropped on before—the chitchat veered in a direction that made my hand pause. Miss Mona said, “Oh, I hear Opal Shaw was at it again at the cemetery. Sitting on the ground the other night and weeping over that grave like she thought nobody could see her.”

“Maybe she doesn’t think it
matters
if anybody sees her,” Mrs. Patterson said.

“Well, of
course
it matters. Why else doesn’t she talk to anybody about it? Why else doesn’t she put a marker on that grave? I tell you, everyone says it’s the most unsettling thing, seeing her kneeling in the dirt there and not knowing who on earth she’s having a visit with.”

“Well,” Mrs. Patterson commented drily. “It isn’t anybody
on
earth, is it? It’s someone
in
the earth.”

“Yes, Lily.” An exasperated
humph.
“I stand corrected.
In
the earth. It’s obviously a grave, you know. It’s a mound like all the others.”

“Is it easy to find?” Mrs. Patterson asked. “After hearing all the gossip, I’d like to go take a look at it sometime.”

“It’s down at the cemetery beside Lafayette Park. Beside the church where she goes. It’s the plot just past the huge cedars there.”

“Have
you
been to see it, Mona?”

“Me?
No
. I’m just telling you what I’ve heard. Why would
I
go down there and be a busybody?
I’m
certainly not going to go prying into other people’s business. This much I know, though. She may be one fashionable woman, Lily—she may wear her white gloves to every important function and she may drive a car better than the one belonging to the mayor of St. Louis—but I tell you, there’s more to that woman than meets the eye. She keeps too much to herself. I don’t blame
anybody
who wants to avoid her.”

I flicked the button and hung up the receiver. Miss Mona’s words echoed in my ears. Maybe I butted heads with Miss Shaw in her jewelry shop and tried to give her reasons to fire me, but it infuriated me to hear these women going on when they didn’t have any idea what they were talking about.

I thought back to the time I’d given Miss Shaw the chance to set me straight. I’d taken her silence for denial: This graveyard gossip couldn’t be true. It made me plain mad, hearing these two whispering about nothing.

Daddy could punish me all he wanted for leaving. I knew just where I could go to disprove the gossipers.

The cemetery grounds stood groomed and quiet before me. Each tilting stone had its own shadow to cast, its own story to tell.

As I stood at the cemetery gate in the pretty neighborhood that bordered Lafayette Park, I thought about how certain I was that I wouldn’t find the grave Miss Mona described over the party line. I might constantly try Miss Shaw’s patience in the jewelry shop, but she never gave up on me. Miss Shaw’s steady, unswerving faith in what I could do left me with a growing, grudging respect for her.

I
needed
Miss Shaw to be the person she had shown herself to be, not the person I heard everyone else describing.

When I finally worked up my nerve, the gate swung open easily on well-oiled hinges. I stepped inside and made my way along a stone path. The remnants of a fish pond, where once a small hollow of water must have stood and fish must have risen to feed in the bubbles, had decayed into a chipped, hollow basin. A yellowed marble statue of a shepherd boy stood with his arms gesturing to the sky.

Oh, how I wanted to trust Miss Shaw. Oh, how I didn’t want her to be hiding anything from me.

The farther I walked without finding anything suspicious, the more confident I became. And the more confident I became, the higher my heart began to lift. Until I spotted the open stretch of earth beyond two tall cedars in the distance. Then my pulse started to hammer in my throat. With one more step, I saw a plot with no ornamentation, no marker. This might have been the corner of any park, where a family would picnic, a child would play, except for the way this one square of earth had been mounded up and cleared of any leaves fluttering down. I knew then that I’d discovered something Miss Shaw wouldn’t want me to see. I couldn’t have been more certain if she had been there herself, leaning over it.

A grave site with no stone.

Maybe I can’t trust anything Miss Shaw has ever said to me. Maybe she didn’t tell me the truth about myself, either.

I have no idea how long I stood with my eyes locked on that spot of ground, my hands pressed to my stomach. I stood there until I lost track of time, until I could finally force air into my lungs again. I pictured myself in a Grace Kelly movie—not one I knew, but one that hadn’t been written yet. One directed by Alfred Hitchcock in which some horrible fiend was chasing Grace and she staggered against the wall in fright. Any minute, Cary Grant or Gary Cooper would swing her into his arms and shake her and say he’d come to save her, but she would wrench away. She would stand as straight as a lightning rod and lift her chin at him the same stately way I lifted mine, and she would say something sophisticated in her practiced, melodic voice.

I began to wander mindlessly, uncertain where to go. I left the cemetery and wandered the width of Lafayette Square, past rows of three-story houses, one of which had to be Miss Shaw’s. I kept right on going. I didn’t change direction or figure out where I was headed until I crossed Chouteau Street.

That’s when I began to walk in the direction of the Ville. I felt as drawn to the Crocketts’ house as shavings are drawn to a magnet. But where I’d once felt at ease roaming the Ville with Aurelia, I now felt like an interloper. On a street that had once seemed to pour its life out on me, I felt like anything I touched would dissipate into dust. I had given up my right to be here.

Yet here I was.

Aurelia’s neighborhood seemed to crank to life the moment I stepped into it. Ahead of me a tabby cat with a cockeyed tail crossed the street at an angle. From an open window, I could hear a record player skipping over a song by Mamie Smith, one of those women who sang so strong, Eddie Crockett said the town musicians called them lung busters. A lone figure turned and swung a broom handle—a little boy not much bigger than Garland, who kept pitching a bottle cap caked with dirt into the air and aiming to slam it.

Still, the silence troubled me. Not silence, exactly, but the absence of the one sound that I loved above all others. The sound of Aurelia’s daddy wailing on his horn from the second-story windowsill like nobody’s business.

I rounded the front of the Crocketts’ flat, my heart feeling like it was going to rattle out of my chest from misery. I peered up at Eddie’s window, noticing how empty and sad it looked. And while I was staring upstairs, I missed seeing him sitting right there on the front stoop.

“You gone and missed Garland’s birthday party,” he said, like I’d stopped by not three hours before.

That moment—seeing him there on the stoop—was the first time I understood that something doesn’t disappear when you push it away. It waits for you, and eventually, when it beckons, you’ve got to go back to it.

Eddie Crockett wasn’t holding a horn, but the fingers on his left hand kept moving just the same, rippling over invisible keys.

“They all went over to the Y to go swimming.” When he spoke I felt like he shined on me, like the sun had suddenly moved out from behind a cloud.

“I’m too scared to see Aurelia,” I blurted out. I hadn’t known I was going to cry; I think Mr. Crockett saw it before I did.

“Baby girl,” he invited me in a voice as warm as coffee and as rich as alderwood, and I went to him. He held me the way I’d always dreamed a father would hold me, safe against the front of his shirt while I clung to his collar and cried on his buttons. He held me tight with one massive fist pinned against my shoulder, rapping me with his knuckles for comfort. His empty shirt sleeve dangled at his side, ending in a thick knot.

“I’m s-sorry,” I said with my teeth clenched, tears soaking his pocket, my nose starting to run. “I . . . I . . .
can’t . . .”
I shook my head at him through my tears. “My sister is gone, and there isn’t
anybody . . .”