The Penny (22 page)
The footsteps stopped outside my door. I rocked back on my heels. And waited.
I heard Daddy’s breathing on the opposite side of the door. I dared to rise, but when I did, the floor groaned.
Daddy’s stealth could mean only one thing. He’d gotten more cautious with Jean home. He waited to make certain no one heard anything.
Silently, I pressed my hands to the door. As if I stood any chance at all of holding it shut against him. I held my breath as the doorknob turned.
That’s the minute I figured something out. While I was wondering whether my prayers made any difference at all, God must have been working on Daddy’s heart even though I couldn’t see it.
That was the moment the door should have inched open.
Only it didn’t.
When Daddy’s steps moved on, I felt the blood drain from my head. I almost fainted with relief. Until the footsteps stopped again. Outside Jean’s room.
I panicked. I shouldn’t have left her. What had I been thinking?
I hadn’t decided what I was going to do yet. But I was onto him. Nothing Daddy could do or say could make me live in fear anymore. I listened to the One who loved me unconditionally and assured me he had a good plan for my life. The one who had been putting pennies in my path all along. I listened to Jesus saying,
You watch out for those little reminders of me right in front of your face, and I’ll be the one to take care of all the big things. Always remember, I’m a step ahead of you, putting pennies in your path with my love, every place you end up walking.
Mama’s voice murmured something in the hallway. At first, I thought she’d finally come to stop him. But her voice came from too far away.
I cracked my door. Down the hall, Jean’s door stood ajar. I hadn’t latched it firmly behind me.
My parents’ words swept over me in waves of warning. I didn’t understand their meaning, but I knew the tone. Mama sounded frightened in a way I’d never heard her before.
“Now that we . . . But things have gotten . . . You said yourself . . .” And then Daddy hit her.
Jesus had been a step ahead of me all along, putting pennies in my path, and I knew which direction he intended me to walk now. I didn’t know what I’d do when I got there. I don’t even remember how I made it up the hall.
I entered my parents’ bedroom and stood in the narrow space between the chest of drawers and the bedside table. I must have been only a shadow to them, a silhouette cast aside as the light from the headlights of a car moved along the street.
“Jenny?” Mama’s voice quavered hard. “Is that you?”
“Get on out of here,” Daddy said. “You got no place in here.”
I didn’t budge. Sometimes confronting somebody is the only way to overcome fear. That night I realized God doesn’t always make something go away because we pray. When we pray, he often gives us the strength to stand up to it.
I’d never been so scared in all my life. But I stood rooted. I heard a rustle of nightgown beside me and knew Jean had come, too. Her fingers reached for mine. I took them and squeezed.
Daddy advanced on us from where he’d been hanging on to Mama. “What are you two
asking for
? Get on out of here.”
Thank heaven for a dark so thick that he couldn’t see my knees shaking. Thank heaven I was done watching Mama handle our hurts by turning a deaf ear and blinding her eyes. Thank heaven Jean was standing beside me as a way of agreeing that it was time for the abuse to stop.
Somebody just needed to stand up, and that’s what I was doing.
Daddy’s voice dropped an octave. It rumbled low, ready to explode.
“You know what I’m capable of, don’t you? If you two don’t stop this, I’ll beat you senseless.”
Something new had taken me over. A determination I had never felt before and a fresh strength in my mind. Mama might have let Daddy hurt us—but I was not going to put up with it any longer. I wasn’t going to let him hurt Mama or Jean or me anymore.
The angrier Daddy got, the more brutal his words became. But they were only words without life, not like the ones surging forth like heart-music in my head, not like the words that had, at last, chased away my emptiness.
Fear not, for I am with you
.
Jean’s hand held me in place.
The longer we took to respond, the more power drained out of Daddy’s cruel words.
A light came on in the Pattersons’ flat below, and our dark outlines changed direction on the wall.
I was finished holding my tongue. I spoke only once, and I knew it would be enough.
“Mama.”
In the splay of light, I saw terror flicker in her eyes as I called her. It must have scared her to death to understand how much we needed her. I saw the glimmer of guilt when she realized that, for years, she’d lacked the courage to do what my sister and I were doing now.
Daddy grabbed Mama when she angled herself away from him.
“No.” She rose. “It’s over. I won’t stand for it anymore.”
Daddy couldn’t win against the three of us. Maybe one alone, but not all of us together.
With his fingers, he ransacked his hair.
It’s not your fault what he did to you.
Maybe that assurance should have come from my mama. Maybe someday it would. But for now, I heard it from a stronger place, a soul place I knew I could depend on.
Mama bundled us in her arms. Jean sobbed.
“I’m so sorry,” Mama whispered to us. “I’m so sorry.”
“We have to start somewhere, Mama.” My words were strong. Firm. Sure.
S
ince the streetcar line into downtown had been shut down and abandoned that winter, I had to ride a new city bus across town to view the Grace Kelly wedding newsreel that April. Me and Jean were both amazed how quickly the months had passed that winter, since I had stood up to Daddy and our lives had changed and my sister had gone back to Lowman’s Secretarial School. Jean saved up and rode a bus three hours from her school so we could see the Grace Kelly newsreel together. I’d never set foot on a city bus before, but the Hodiamont schedule told me what time to wait on the corner until it came, choking out rancid grey smoke as it growled toward me. The bus smelled like warm plastic and fresh leather and glue when I boarded. Its seats were so smooth, I slid into the lady next to me every time we swung a corner. I could tell that when summer came, the bus wasn’t going to be nearly as good as the streetcar for cooling off.
Jean waited for me beside the theater doors, her hat brim pulled low, my movie ticket already in hand. When we settled into the chairs at the theater that day, when my sister sighed in expectation, the feeling of rightness, of us beginning anew in different territory, rose right up and surprised me. I passed the popcorn to Jean. With all this sudden pleasure expanding in my stomach, there wasn’t room for much else.
Just then, the curtains drew apart. The theater darkened. A roaring lion filled the screen, and an anchorman’s resplendent voice announced we’d be viewing
A Wedding in Monaco,
the up-to-the-minute Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer newsreel about Her Serene Highness Princess Grace. Images flickered on screen, Jean squeezed my arm tighter, and suddenly, as we saw the deck of the
U.S.S. Constitution,
each of us might have been sailing across the ocean into Monaco Harbor to meet our princes, too.
Even though the reel was in black and white, I saw everything in vivid shades, and if you asked me years later, even then, I could still describe the colors of the water and the ship-captain’s jacket and the flags draped from the masts of the yacht.
Grace fielded reporters’ questions in the film with style and passion that left me breathless.
“Yes, I’m sad to be leaving home, but I’m thinking about being married, I’m happy about being married. Most every girl thinks about being married at times like this.”
“. . . Upon marrying His Highness, I will have dual citizenship.”
“. . . Yes, if we were to have children, the same would hold for them as well.”
It would take two ceremonies,
the newsreel touted
, to unite Grace and her prince in royal matrimony. In a ceremony broadcast to all of Europe, eighty carefully selected members of immediate family and friends were allowed in the throne room of the Palace of Monaco to witness the civil ceremony. During the forty-minute service, Grace wore a pale pink taffeta suit and white kid gloves, the couple exchanged vows in French, the national language of Monaco, and Grace listened to the recitation of her new 142 official titles, counterpoints of Rainier’s own.
I conveniently forgot to “tsk tsk” Jean about placing more stock in somebody else’s life than she did in her own. I understood why my sister did it. I listened to every detail about the regal ivory gown, which had been created under top-secret conditions. I imagined myself in the fitted bodice of Brussels lace, my prayer book and shoes glistening with seed pearls. I pictured how I’d hold my head high in the Juliet headpiece with the tiny row of orange blossoms, and the round veil made from some ninety yards of tulle and a constellation of pearls, specially designed so the vast audience could see the bride’s face.
Finally, because of Miss Shaw and Aurelia, I was beginning to understand the truth. The one prince who cared for me more than his own life wanted to take me by the hand and make me whole.
Jean and I sat in the audience together long after the orchestra music swelled and the credits ran and the curtains drew together. We knew that from now on, when we saw Grace Kelly, we would watch her in a different way. Both of us had our own lives to begin living now.
Something had ended. Something had begun. My sister looked at me and smiled as the theater lights blinked on. She took my hand and, together, we squinted, our eyes adjusting to the light as we made our way out into the golden sun.
Even though everyone kept asking me whether Miss Shaw had her hair styled at Rogier’s Salon (which is where Debbie Reynolds had gotten hers done on the way through town), or whether she’d purchased her latest pocketbook on the third floor of Sonnenfield’s, or whether she used thirty-weight oil in her convertible to keep it running so smoothly, I noticed with pleasure how the neighbors had started asking her questions directly, too.
After I stood up to Daddy that night, Mama had finally stopped looking the other way when Daddy’s anger flared. Sure, her voice quavered when she said the next morning, “I am not going to let you hurt the girls anymore,” but it was enough to make Daddy pause and scrutinize her anew.
It had been Mama who looked up Miss Shaw’s phone number in the book. It had been Mama who reached out to my new friend that next day, not in search of charity, but in hopes of getting some sensible advice. If Daddy was willing to change, eventually there might be a chance of putting our family back together.
But Miss Shaw must have been the one to help Mama get her nerve up and move us out of that place until Daddy got some help. Miss Shaw must’ve said, “I have a big, old house. There certainly would be enough room for you to stay for a while until you could get on your feet,” because before I knew anything else, the two of them had decided. Miss Shaw arrived at the front curb in her baby-blue Cadillac, and we loaded a few meager bags into the trunk when Daddy wasn’t home. She drove us to her place before another night passed. And ever since we moved into the big house with Miss Shaw for those few months, people got even more curious about getting to know our benefactor from the inside, too.
One rainy day, I caught Miss Shaw climbing from the front seat of her car, and she wasn’t holding up an umbrella to keep her hairdo dry. She wasn’t holding an edition of the
Post-Dispatch
over her head to keep it from getting mussed, either. Instead, she’d tied on one of those cellophane, polka-dotted rain bonnets, the sort that unfolds from a plastic pouch that reads R
OYAL
M
UTUAL
I
NSURANCE
, S
AFETY FOR A
R
AINY
D
AY
and is given away free at home shows. Miss Shaw had trussed up her hair in that thing the same way a chef would truss up a Christmas goose.
When she stepped inside the door, she untied the bonnet and shook it dry.
So
that
was how Miss Shaw never got wet hair on a rainy day. She folded it back inside its tiny pouch and tucked it inside her pocketbook where no one could see it. Now I knew. There wasn’t magic to her life after all—just practicality and smarts.
And faith. A whole big dose of faith, which she’d shown me how to hang onto. I liked to think that I helped her hang onto hers a little better, too.
Mama loved Miss Shaw’s garden because it grew plenty of lilacs. She loved to snip the bushes and make up bouquets of them. Some, Mama placed in vases around Miss Shaw’s house. Others, she tied with ribbons for Miss Shaw to take to the cemetery.
Sometimes Miss Shaw told me she would like me to go with her. I would kneel beside her at the grave, which didn’t seem so dry and deserted anymore. Del Henry had edged it with solid, red bricks. At the head of the grave, the stone he’d made read: A
LICE
S
HAW
. M
Y
M
OTHER
.
Now that Miss Shaw had marked her mother’s grave and had started letting people see her hands (maybe one day soon Del Henry would slide a diamond on her finger!), lots of people said the mystery of Miss Shaw wasn’t such a mystery anymore.
Mixing people from two St. Louis neighborhoods, no matter what color, was like stirring water and oil. Like the instance with the portable building at Harris School, everybody would get riled up for a while. But things would get back to normal again after that, and nobody let it affect everyday life much. People stuck to their own neighborhoods because it was the only way of life they knew; it had been that way for as long as anyone could remember.
I heard Aunt Maureen tell Darnell once that she didn’t like how residents of the Ville weren’t allowed to work downtown unless they were pushing brooms or running elevators. I was glad Aunt Maureen couldn’t be satisfied with coloreds not being equal.
You could live your life in the Crocketts’ neighborhood without ever leaving those few streets; the Ville had its own restaurants, movies, shops, and schools. There were plenty of good jobs to be had, the same as Wellston or O’Fallon Park, the same as Webster or Kirkwood. But at Katz Drug they started letting Aurelia and Garland come in once a week and sit at the soda fountain, the purpose of which, the article in the
Post-Register
said, was to “give store officials the opportunity to observe customer and employee reactions.” On May 7 and May 14, Maureen Crockett and Wanda Simpson were served without incident. On May 22, though, Margaret Dagen and Marion O’Fallon were ignored and then later sent away without service.
That May was when Eddie Crockett learned to play his trumpet with one hand. That was Eddie Crockett for you; he went and figured out how to do what he loved. The preacher at Antioch Baptist Church was just getting ready to start up and the music was wafting to the rafters and I was staring at the window shaped like a dove, remembering when I had looked through there to find Aurelia and how that glass dove had started it all, the day after I found the penny. All of a sudden, somebody started talking about there being special music today and everybody started clapping, but nobody walked up to the pulpit. Nobody came until everybody took their seats and the hand-fans stopped moving. Then there came Eddie, carrying his trumpet in one hand.
Eddie Crockett played “In the Garden,” and he played “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” and to join those two together, he played something that sounded more like Duke Ellington’s “Rockin’ in Rhythm” than anything else. He started out slow. But when everybody jumped up out of their seats and lifted their hands, started singing or just smiling wide, I tell you, the trumpet man’s fingers started moving faster. You got the feeling watching that gleam in Eddie Crockett’s eye that he’d be working the instrument until he was satisfied, until he got his fingers trilling double time.
I listened to his sound and thought about his lessons with Mr. Lamoretti and how I’d seen the dancers on the
Admiral
rooting for the Six Blue Notes and Eddie Crockett while he played. I listened and saw how, in music, there wasn’t a hard-and-fast color line. I saw how music could be a real good thing for our town.
As Eddie Crockett played his trumpet, his round, warm notes sent a message to all of us. The notes sang out that with God’s help a person like me could survive a broken life and come out whole.