3
Destroyed by Love
Supposedly, Jenny Tull was going to be a beauty someday, but the people who told her that were so old they might easily be dead by the time that day arrived, and no one her own age saw much promise in her. At seventeen, she was skinny and severe and studious-looking. Her bones were so sharp, they seemed likely to puncture her skin. She had coarse dark hair that she was always hacking at, much to her mother’s disapproval — one week chopping it to a blunt, square shape; the next week cutting bangs that accidentally slanted toward the left; and then, to correct her error, shortening the bangs so drastically that they appeared damaged and painful. While her classmates were wearing (in 1952) bouffant skirts and perky blouses with the collars turned up in back, Jenny’s clothes were hand- me-downs from her mother: limp, skimpy dresses fashionable in the forties, with too much shoulder and not enough skirt. And since her mother despised the sloppiness of loafers, Jenny’s shoes were the same kind of sturdy brown oxfords that her brothers wore. Every morning she clomped off to school looking uncomfortable and cross. No wonder hardly anyone bothered to speak to her.
She was about to be, for the very first time, the only child at home. Her brother Cody was away at college. Her brother Ezra had refused to go to college and started instead what his mother openly hoped was a temporary job in Scarlatti’s Restaurant, chopping vegetables for salads; but just as he was advancing to sauces, notice came that he’d been drafted. None of his family could envision it: placid Ezra slogging through Korea, tripping over his bayonet at every opportunity. Surely something would be wrong with him, some weakness of spine or eyesight that would save him. But no, he was found to be in perfect health, and in February was ordered off to a training camp down south. Jenny sat on his bed while he packed. She was touched by the fact that he was taking along his little pearwood recorder, the one he’d bought with his first week’s wages. It didn’t seem to her that he had a very clear idea of what he was getting into. He moved in his cautious, deliberate way, sorting out what he would send to the basement for storage. Since their mother had plans for renting his room, he couldn’t just leave things as they were. Already his brother Cody’s bed was freshly made up for a boarder, the blankets tight as drumskins on the narrow mattress, and Cody’s sports equipment was packed away in cartons.
She watched Ezra empty a drawer of undershirts, most of them full of holes. (Somehow, he always managed to look like an orphan.) He had grown to be a large-boned man, but his face was still childishly rounded, with the wide eyes, the downy cheeks, the delicate lips of a schoolboy. His hair seemed formed of layers of silk in various shades of yellow and beige. Girls were always after him, Jenny knew, but he was too shy to take advantage of it — or maybe even to be aware of it. He proceeded through life absentmindedly, meditatively, as if considering some complex mathematical puzzle from which he was bound to look up, you would think, as soon as he found the solution. But he never did.
“After I leave,” he told Jenny, “will you stop in at Scarlatti’s Restaurant from time to time?”
“Stop in and do what?”
“Well, talk with Mrs. Scarlatti, I mean. Just make sure she’s all right.”
Mrs. Scarlatti had been without a husband for years, if she’d ever had one, and her only son had recently been killed in action. Jenny knew she must be lonely. But she was a bleak and striking woman, so fashionably dressed that it seemed an insult to her particular section of Baltimore. Jenny couldn’t imagine holding a conversation with her. Still, anything for Ezra. She nodded.
“And Josiah too,” Ezra said.
“Josiah!”
Josiah was even more difficult — downright terrifying, in fact: Ezra’s friend Josiah Payson, close to seven feet tall, excitable, and incoherent. It was generally understood that he wasn’t quite right in the head. Back in grade school, the other children had teased him, and they had teased Ezra too and asked Jenny why her brother hung out with dummies. “Everybody knows Josiah should be sent away,” they told her. “He ought to go to the crazy house; everybody says so.”
She said, “Ezra, I can’t talk to Josiah. I wouldn’t understand him.”
“Of course you’d understand,” said Ezra. “He speaks English, doesn’t he?”
“He jibbers, he jabbers, he stutters!”
“You must have only seen him when they’re picking on him. The rest of the time he’s fine. Oh, if Mother’d let me have him to the house once, you would know. He’s fine! He’s as bright as you or me, and maybe brighter.”
“Well, if you say so,” Jenny told him.
But she wasn’t convinced.
After Ezra was gone, it occurred to her that he’d only mentioned outsiders. He hadn’t said anything about taking care of their mother. Maybe he assumed that Pearl could manage on her own. She could manage very well, it was true, but Ezra’s leaving seemed to take something out of her. She delayed the renting of his room. “I know we need the money,” she told Jenny, “but I really can’t face it right now. It still has his smell. Maybe if I aired it a while … It still has his shape in it, know what I mean? I look in and the air feels full of something warm. I think we ought to wait a bit.”
So they lived in the house alone. Jenny felt even slighter than usual, overwhelmed by so much empty space. In the afternoons when she came home from school, her mother would still be at work, and Jenny would open the door and hesitantly step inside. Sometimes it seemed there was a startled motion, or a stopping of motion, somewhere deep in the house just as she crossed the threshold. She’d pause then, heart thumping, alert as a deer, but it never turned out to be anything real. She’d close the door behind her and go upstairs to her room, turn on her study lamp, change out of her school clothes. She was an orderly, conscientious girl who always hung things up and took good care of her belongings. She would set her books out neatly on her desk, align her pencils, and adjust the lamp so it shone at the proper angle. Then she’d work her way systematically through her assignments. Her greatest dream was to be a doctor, which meant she’d have to win a scholarship. In three years of high school, she had never received a grade below an A.
At five o’clock she would go downstairs to scrub the potatoes or start the chicken frying — whatever was instructed in her mother’s note on the kitchen table. Soon afterward her mother would arrive. “Well! I tell you that old Pendle woman is a trial and a nuisance, just a nuisance, lets me ring up all her groceries and then says, ‘Wait now, let me see, why, I don’t have near enough money for such a bill as this.’ Goes fumbling through her ratty cloth change purse while everyone behind her shifts from foot to foot …” She would tie an apron over her dress and take Jenny’s place at the stove. “Honey, hand me the salt, will you? I see there’s no mail from the boys. They’ve forgotten all about us, it seems. It’s only you and me now.”
It was only the two of them, yes, but there were echoes of the others all around — wicked, funny Cody, peaceful Ezra, setting up a loaded silence as Jenny and her mother seated themselves at the table. “Pour the milk, will you, dear? Help yourself to some beans.” Sometimes Jenny imagined that even her father made his absence felt, though she couldn’t picture his face and had little recollection of the time before he’d left them. Of course she never mentioned this to her mother. Their talk was small talk, little dibs and dabs of things, safely skating over whatever might lie beneath. “How is that poor Carroll girl, Jenny? Has she lost any weight that you’ve noticed?”
Jenny knew that, in reality, her mother was a dangerous person — hot breathed and full of rage and unpredictable. The dry, straw texture of her lashes could seem the result of some conflagration, and her pale hair could crackle electrically from its bun and her eyes could get small as hatpins. Which of her children had not felt her stinging slap, with the claw-encased pearl in her engagement ring that could bloody a lip at one flick? Jenny had seen her hurl Cody down a flight of stairs. She’d seen Ezra ducking, elbows raised, warding off an attack. She herself, more than once, had been slammed against a wall, been called “serpent,” “cockroach,” “hideous little sniveling guttersnipe.” But here Pearl sat, decorously inquiring about Julia Carroll’s weight problem. Jenny had a faint, tremulous hope that times had changed. Perhaps it was the boys’ fault. Maybe she and her mother — intelligent women, after all — could live without such scenes forever. But she never felt entirely secure, and at night, when Pearl had placed a kiss on the center of Jenny’s forehead, Jenny went off to bed and dreamed what she had always dreamed: her mother laughed a witch’s shrieking laugh; dragged Jenny out of hiding as the Nazis tramped up the stairs; accused her of sins and crimes that had never crossed Jenny’s mind. Her mother told her, in an informative and considerate tone of voice, that she was raising Jenny to eat her.
