Poor Jenny, Bright As A Penny

Chapter 17

Jenny ran up the stairs. The apartment door was ajar, the rooms empty, as if they had been left vacant.

Crystal was standing on the balcony with her back to Jenny. How thin she was; her shoulder blades showed through the cotton dress. One hand gripped the rail and the other dangled a pop bottle; the coil of her hair had come unpinned so it hung crookedly with one strand brushing her shoulder.

“Crystal?”

Crystal turned, put her hand on the door frame, then moved unsurely into the room. “Where is Mama?” Jenny put her arms around her and they stood holding each other. Crystal’s body felt so frail, the cold bottle Crystal held pressed against Jenny’s back seemed more real than Crystal did. She slumped lightly against Jenny, as if she were very tired. “Jenny, my head hurts.”

Jenny stroked Crystal’s head, wondering how she was going to get her home—or if perhaps she would come willingly. Crystal pushed her face against Jenny’s neck. All her weight was on Jenny now, and Jenny felt a wetness. Was Crystal crying? She held Crystal away, then stared at her. Saliva was running from her mouth. “Jenny, my head hurts.”

Then her body went limp. She buckled to her knees and crouched with her head down. Jenny knelt, trying to hold her, but Crystal slipped and fell forward onto the rug. She lay there unmoving. Her saliva puddled slowly onto the worn carpet.

Cold fear gripped Jenny. Then she made herself move. She rummaged through her pockets, but they were empty. She dug into Crystal’s pockets, dumping out a handful of change and pills and a crumpled paper onto the floor. She fished out some dimes and ran from the room.

She reached the phone, found the number. The dial worked so slowly.

Finally it was done; she had given the address. She turned, and the landlady, a white wraith, stood blocking her way. Jenny shouldered past her and ran; she fell once on the stairs, grabbed the rail, ran headlong up the stairs.

Crystal’s body lay stiff, her head pulled backward as if her spine had been jerked taut. The neck of the bottle was between her teeth, crushed into slivers, and blood was running from her mouth. Jenny tried not to scream. She tried to remove the bottle, but Crystal’s mouth was like a vice. She hear a stir behind her and a whining voice, “What’s going on here? What’re you doing in my apartment?” The landlady stared down angrily at Crystal.

“Oh, please,” Jenny could hear the siren now. “Please, the ambulance is coming. Go and show them the way.”

“How did you get in here?” The landlady grabbed Jenny’s shoulder and spun her back so her hand grazed Crystal and the glass cut deeper.

“Leave us alone!” Jenny screamed with horror. “Don’t touch us again!”

Crystal relaxed and lay limp. Now Jenny removed the bottle easily, and began pulling shards of glass from Crystal’s mouth. The landlady stood staring. “Go show them the way,” Jenny screamed at her. She got up, turned the woman around, and pushed her toward the door. “Go—show—them—the—way.”

The woman went.

Jenny knelt beside Crystal.

Crystal stiffened again, her head jerked back, and Jenny bit her own lip in agony. Then there were footsteps and men’s voices mixed with the whine of the landlady’s voice.

Someone pulled her away from Crystal, Crystal went limp, and Jenny could feel hard, stubborn fingers on her arms. “Stop it, Jenny!” Then she realized she had been fighting to keep from being taken away; white-coated men bent over Crystal and lifted her onto a stretcher.

Ben was shaking Jenny and saying, “What did she take? Tell me what she took.”

“I don’t know. She had a pop bottle. She bit it and smashed it.” She was beginning to feel sick. “I don’t know what she took.” She pointed dumbly to the rug where shattered glass and pills and coins lay in a pool of blood.

“How many convulsions did she have?”

“I was at the phone. The first one I—I saw was when I got back. Then the one when you came.”

The men carried Crystal out and Jenny tried to pull away from Ben, but he held her.

“I want to go with her.”

“I’ll take you to the hospital in a minute. How long were you with her?”

“I don’t know. Maybe ten minutes.”

“Could she speak to you?” The siren screamed as the ambulance pulled away.

“She was standing on the balcony. Yes, she talked to me. She asked for Mama.” Jenny’s voice trembled. “She said her head hurt.”

A detective arrived, Ben talked to him, then led Jenny out and made her sit in the police car while he questioned the landlady. Then he came into the dark car, spoke over the radio, and started for the hospital.

In the waiting room Jenny sat still as a stone. Ben put his coat around her and she wondered why, because she didn’t think she was cold; she could not feel anything, cold or warm.

She waited by herself, silent and numb. When Ben came back he did not speak until she looked up at him, questioning.

“They’re doing all they can.”

“Will she die?”

“I don’t know, Jenny.”

“But what did she take?”

“The doctor thinks it was strychnine.”

“Strychnine.” The sudden vision of a poisoned dog, writhing, was all she could make of it. She sat dumbly staring at him.

“They will test the pills she had. If it was strychnine, I can tell you that she did not take it on purpose.”

They sat silently. She wanted to know what he meant, where Crystal could have gotten such a thing. And yet she did not want to know. She thought of Crystal as she had looked once, standing before a mirror fastening a golden necklace and smiling. She thought of Crystal sitting with the boys in the back of the school bus, smoking and laughing, Crystal coming in late and soaking from the rain. Crystal when Mama tried to hold her on her lap and rock her.

When the doctor told Jenny that Crystal was dead, she did not believe him. He tried patiently to explain, but she would not comprehend; she wanted to go to Crystal, she begged to go to Crystal. Finally the doctor led her down the hall and she stood by Crystal’s bed. Crystal’s right hand lay palm up, the palm of her hand was beautiful, her arm was beautiful.

Only her face looked dead. Jenny turned away, and she was sick. A nurse held her over a basin, and she heaved and heaved until she could not stand.

When Ben came for her he put his coat around her shoulders once more—she could not remember losing it; he almost lifted her into the car. “I can’t get Georgie on the phone, they must be out. Do you want to go home, Jenny?”

“I don’t know.” If Georgie were there everything would be all right.

But it would not be all right. Crystal was dead. Georgie could not change that.

Ben did not talk to her, but he spoke on the radio and his voice was comforting. Once she said, “I’ll be all right when I get home. Don’t call Georgie.” But she did not know how to tell Mama. And once she said, “Will you get into trouble for staying at the hospital with me?”

“I often do stay, when there’s a question.”

He parked in front of the cottage. Jenny looked once at the darkened windows, then could not look back. “Tell me how she got strychnine.”

“Crystal was the third one tonight, Jenny. Someone has packed some pills, bennies and yo-yo’s, with strychnine.”

“To kill people?”

“Yes.”

“But why?” She looked again at the darkened house. She did not know how to tell Mama.

“It may have to do with the narcotics raids, some kind of retribution. Perhaps a pusher informed on another. Perhaps those pills were slipped into his delivery.”

“To kill anyone who dealt with him?”

“Yes.”

Jenny pushed her knuckles against her mouth and tried not to see Crystal contorted and bleeding; tried not to see Crystal dead.

“I’ll go in with you,” he helped her to the porch and inside.

They lit a lamp. Ben looked around the room, and glanced at Mama’s closed door.

Jenny sat down on Bingo’s bed, then looked up at Ben. “I could wait until morning. I could wait to tell him. He doesn’t need to know tonight.” Ben just looked back at her. “I guess he has a right, though.” Jenny said. “If I tell Mama—if I must tell Mama tonight, then Bingo has a right to be told.” She leaned over and put her arms around Bingo until he was awake. He looked blindly into the light, then sat up. Jenny gave him his glasses. He was slow to come completely awake. Then he began to look puzzled at seeing Ben there, began to see that something was wrong.

When he was ready, she told him.

Bingo didn’t say anything for a long time. Then he said numbly, “Crystal was afraid.” He had turned very pale. “When I saw her, Crystal was afraid.”

Jenny couldn’t bear it, she tried to hold him, but he didn’t want to be held. “Please—can you—” she began. She looked down at him: She must have looked desolate because he put his arms around her then. “Can you remember her,” Jenny said, “please, Bingo, the way she used to be.”

When they told Mama, Mama stared woodenly at Ben’s uniform, as if it were the only real thing in the room. As if it were the only thing that made her believe what they were telling her. She looked at Jenny once, slid a glance at Bingo, then she removed her gaze to the center of her bed. Jenny touched her tentatively, but she was cold and remote. She would not move or speak.

Ben told her as gently as he could that she must go the next day to identify Crystal. Mama made no sign whatever that she understood him. Jenny sat by Mama’s bed for a long time, and Bingo spent the rest of the night curled beside Mama with a blanket over him. Mama said no word, made no movement.

In the morning Mama spoke to them in monosyllables and would not eat. Jenny wanted to go with her to the morgue, but Mama would not have it; she turned so cold and furious that Jenny could not defy her. She would take a taxi and the cab driver would be all the help she needed.

Jenny did not know what she would do, alone by herself.

But Mama got home all right. She had a bottle with her. She got a glass from the kitchen, sat down on the day bed, laid her crutches carefully beside her, and poured the glass full of whiskey. She drank it, then she poured another.

Mama drank steadily from that morning until the funeral two days later. She would drink, pass out, wake, and begin drinking again. Jenny got her to eat only occasionally. She had taken all of Jenny’s money and hidden it; when her bottle was empty she took up her crutches and hobbled carefully to the liquor store four blocks away and bought another one. She seldom spoke.

Once she brought a paper home and laid it in the center of Jenny’s desk. The headlines said there had been nine strychnine poisonings in two days, and that it was thought to be retribution toward an unnamed informer. Warnings were given against using any capsules as there was no indication as to how many had been circulated. The dead were listed. It was shocking to see Crystal’s name there. Jenny stuffed the paper into a drawer of her desk and would not look at it again.

Mr. Knutson came to pay his respects. He had arranged the funeral. Mama only looked at him stonily. Georgie came and Jenny thought she could stop Mama’s drinking, but Georgie said, “Leave her alone, Jenny.” So Jenny did.

*

The funeral is over. We are home again and Mama is passed out on her bed. Now there is such an emptiness. I must write about it, and yet I cannot say what I feel. It’s as if a weight is pressing the air flat and heavy between us so even the hearing of each other’s voices is deadened.

The funeral was so strange. And Mama—oh, I can’t even write about Mama. The funeral was as if we were all wrapped in cotton wool. The room was hushed and people whispered. There were only just Mama and Bingo and me, Mr. Knutson, and the Dermodys. Who else would there be? Who else knew or cared? Jack and Ben were pallbearers. That was the last kindness Crystal will ever have.

But the hushed room, and the whispering, and the awful sweet smell of flowers, and the stink of Mama’s whiskey, all made me feel sick. Bingo had a hard time to keep from throwing up. Before we sat down to the service, Mama lurched up drunkenly on her crutch to look at Crystal.

We bought white flowers for the coffin. I did not want to look at Crystal, and Bingo would not. He went white as a sheet when Mama tried to force him. The sermon was—hypocritical. It didn’t say anything real about Crystal or why this happened to her. The minister had a face like wax. He looked like a wax figure standing there in his black suit, holding his black Bible, staring at the tops of our heads.

The funeral didn’t mean anything to me. All I could think was, Is Crystal nothing now? Or is she somewhere else? I thought of what they tell us in school, that all that really exists is what can be seen by science, anything we can’t see and measure is only imagination.

But I don’t believe that.

Hundreds of years ago a lot of things existed that people didn’t know about. Now they are seen and measured by science. Maybe science just hasn’t learned to measure our spirits yet.

When Crystal’s own cells vanish, will there be nothing left of her? But Crystal was not in that coffin, only her body. Where is she?

Anyway, the funeral sickened me. It was meant to soothe and not let you think. Can there ever be an excuse for not thinking, no matter how much it hurts? Maybe. Maybe Mama needed not to think, maybe that’s why she got so drunk. Mama reeked of whiskey and her face was so red. Georgie and I had to take her crutch away from her and almost lift her to get her down the steps. We stood with her between us, watching Crystal’s coffin carried down and put into the hearse. Jack and Ben walked solemnly at the head of Crystal’s coffin.

We got Mama into the car then. There was a tall board fence by the funeral home, and Bingo stood staring at it, at what was scrawled in chalk across the fence:

\

The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.

Indian-giver be the name of the Lord.

Those words made Bingo furious, he kept to himself in the car, tense and cold. We were all silent riding to the cemetery, except Mama. She cried and made the car reek of whiskey. The trees were bare; I hadn’t noticed before. The last time I looked, they were all golden and lovely, but now the wind had made them bare. It blew the yellow leaves in the gutters and across the hood of the car.

I don’t believe that about the Lord giving and the Lord taking away, I don’t think that’s what it’s all about. The spirit of us, the human part of us that doesn’t die, what is that really?

She tried to think how to say what she felt but could only fumble to express.

I think that all the matter in the universe would just fly apart if it didn’t have something holding it together. All the electrons would just whirl away and could never form themselves into people and trees and stars. Everything would get all mixed up, then run down and stop. I think that what keeps everything in the right place must be something bigger than matter, it must be something that makes order out of matter. And we are part of that. Crystal is part of that.

You can’t have order without intelligence. It is some kind of intelligence that we cannot comprehend.

In the cemetery the yellow leaves blew across Crystal’s coffin, and there was a mound of raw earth next to her grave. You could smell the earth, you knew why it was there. We had been so wrapped in cotton wool at the funeral that nothing was real, but that raw earth was real.

The coffin was suspended over the grave on a rack and the flowers laid to one side. Then the minister said more words. It was cold and bright there, you could smell the new-cut grass—and the raw earth. The wind made the clouds move quickly across the sky.

After the last words, and we had bowed our heads—oh, what good does it do to pray for someone after they are dead? If their spirits are ready to go somewhere wonderful, they go. If they’re not, they’re not. What good does it do to pray for something that some power bigger than us has already decided? But I did, though. We bowed our heads, and I prayed for the soul of my sister.

Then it was over, and the minister went away. The coffin would be lowered after we had gone, and the dirt put over it. We turned away then. But Mama would not go, Mama would not leave Crystal.

Jenny sat staring out the window. She could see the old apartment building; in her mind she could see Crystal walking onto the balcony, then lying on the floor in the blood and glass. Then she saw, once again, the scene at Crystal’s grave. She saw Mama lurch forward toward the coffin, drop her crutch and fall against Crystal’s coffin, clutch at it, crying “No, no, she’s my baby! Give me my baby!”

Mama lay at the foot of Crystal’s coffin, drunk and crying hoarsely.