Jenny and the Jaws of Life Read online

  Their story made no sense. Even small-town police could tell there were no intruders, no robbery. Every piece of evidence, beginning with the temperature of the bodies, argued otherwise. The bodies were too cold. I’ll remember that. The rest of it—tire tracks, deadbolts, broken windows—could not possibly matter less to me. Julie’s children should have been more clever. When challenged, they turned sullen and briefly silent. They swiveled their heads toward one another and blinked like owls.

  “The Willoughbys were not a close family,” says an anonymous neighbor; “Looking back you could see it coming”; and I honestly wonder if the papers don’t invent these people. (Julie would have clipped this for the All Too True and pasted it beside that old yellow photograph from the Clarion Call of a horse-faced woman in a straw hat captioned PAINFULLY INJURED. She was twelve when she cut that one out.) Another Solomon reports that Julie and Samson were “workaholics,” whatever the hell that means, and seldom home, and “the kids ran wild.” So naturally. “Drugs.” Michael and Samantha, the older two, were often “spaced out.” Therefore.

  Mr. Peterson is quoted in the Sunday Tribune, and bless his sensible old soul. “They were strangers,” he says. “They came and went like strangers. There’s a lot of families like that now.”

  But everywhere they display the same picture of Julie the Real Estate Woman, heavy, hard-eyed, thin-lipped, vulgar, her terrible professional smile framed by deep crescents of discontent; her regulation helmet of brassy hair. A face I have never seen and will never accept. A photographer’s trick; falsified evidence, for the storytellers. Here is a fitting subject for cheap tragedy. These are the women whom their young must turn on and devour.

  I’m staying at the Petersons’, waiting for the funeral. I can see the old house from my bedroom window. Julie had it painted tan, or beige, or camel, one of those new colors you can’t remember from one time to the next. The grounds are landscaped now. It looks like someone lifted up the house and unrolled the grass beneath it. There are flower beds and fruit trees set out on the green like furniture. Out back all that’s left of the woods where Father took his long walks are a few birch trees, to mark where the next property, the next lawn, begins. I didn’t know she’d sold the woods.

  Yesterday a gardener came and worked on the rose garden in the backyard, a perfect square with sunburst gravel paths and a sundial and a birdbath; where once there was a smaller, shapeless plot of dirt, dug and planned and turned by children, that summer we tried to grow tomatoes and I used to pick green hornworms off the leaves and throw them onto the roof for the birds to eat.

  Mrs. Peterson caught me watching the gardener, and she said, “The inside’s all changed around, too. You wouldn’t know it.” Somehow she knew she was comforting me.

  It’s the Murder House now, and the neighborhood kids are going to want to believe that it’s haunted. But it isn’t. I can tell that from here. It really was once, haunted, by living children. I wonder if Julie exorcised our ghosts before she died; if in her lifetime she ever stopped running into the ghosts of those children whose kingdom this had been. All I know is, now the house is truly quiet, now that she is gone.

  The night before the funeral I sit up with Mr. Peterson and we drink Iron City in the rumpus room, where the electric trains used to be, and stare at the black screen of his old RCA TV. He tells me all he knows. I can stand to hear this much, and only this much, and only from him. He knew us when we were children.

  Samantha and Michael planned to rob the house and steal Julie’s Mercedes. They were going to run away and they needed money for drugs to sell, in New York City, or Timbuktu. Samson had an old-fashioned safe in his basement office, and when they discovered the combination they set their plan in motion: a complicated, romantic thing involving sunglasses, wigs, and phases of the moon. They could have ripped their parents off in the daytime, when they were out. But this wouldn’t have been as much fun.

  Mr. Peterson shakes his head. “All I can tell you is what Larry told us,” he repeats. Mr. Peterson’s youngest son is a reporter for the Clarion Call. “The police kept asking the kids, ‘But why take risks when you didn’t need to?’ They were trying to make sense out of it, you know. And you know what Samantha said? Something like, ‘It made a better movie this way.’ A better movie! And they asked her, ‘Were you planning to make a movie? What are you talking about?’ But she just laughed at them and said, ‘Yes, that’s right, we were going to Hollywood to make a movie!’ She said the cops were stupid. She said, ‘Don’t worry about it. There’s no way you could ever understand us.’ You know, the way kids do.” Mr. Peterson sips his beer. “Although, I think maybe she was right about that.

  “So that night the kids snuck down to the basement and opened the safe. And don’t you know, what they found in there was a whole lot of nothing. Samson was a hell of a nice fellow, but kind of dim. He always had some little project going down there, some scheme to keep himself busy. I think he only had the safe because he liked the idea of having one, for his ‘important papers,’ his ‘valuables.’ All the kids found were the old mortgage, which your folks paid off forty years ago, and some carbon copies of letters he wrote to magazines, that never got published; and old snapshots of themselves, when they were babies, and of Julie. When she was young, you know.

  “The kids were mad as anything, and Samantha thought about her mother’s jewelry, in her mother’s room, in a case on the bureau.”

  “Which room?” Mr. Peterson looks at me, surprised. “I take it they weren’t sleeping together any more. Did she keep the big bedroom? Mother and Father’s old room?”

  “Yes. Samson slept in the guest room.”

  The only overnight guest we ever had was Samson himself, the night he came here, with his car broken down in the rain, and Julie in her nightgown, at the top of the stairs.

  “They went up there to her bedroom, in the dark,” Mr. Peterson says. “They took Samson’s shotgun from the basement to keep Julie quiet, in case she woke up.” He clears his throat, apologetically. “John, they’re going to claim that they never meant to hurt her. They’re going to say it was an accident.”

  “Uh-huh. And then that darn gun went off again when the old man came through the door.”

  “No, Samson wasn’t accidental.” Mr. Peterson hesitates, holding his breath. His stomach rumbles. “They’re saying Samson was temporary insanity.”

  I laugh out loud and apologize at the same time, but Mr. Peterson is eighty-two years old now, and he smiles at me, acknowledging horror and despair with a sweet smile, the way some old people do, and some not so old people who have suffered early.

  “That’s all right, John,” he says. “I think so, too.”

  “So. I knew she wasn’t asleep. She saw it coming.” After a while I ask for it. “What did she do? What did she say?”

  Mr. Peterson leans toward me, with his terrible sweet smile. “They’re saying she didn’t do anything. She switched on the light by the bed and just looked at them standing there, with her jewelry box and the gun. They’re saying she just stared at them for a long time with a funny look on her face. Like…‘Now I’ve seen it all.’ No, that’s not it. Isn’t that awful.” Mr. Peterson shades his eyes, taps his foot in frustration, disgusted with himself. “Break. Something about a break. ‘Give me a break!’ That’s it.” For a moment he is triumphant; he recollects himself. “That’s the way they put it. ‘She looked at us like Give me a break.’ Then she switched the light off and pulled the covers up and turned her back on both of them.

  “Made ’em mad, John. Michael or Samantha—they won’t say which one, they’re thick as thieves—went over to the bed and did something with the gun, to make a sound, to get her attention. Waved it around, maybe; fooled with the trigger.” Mr. Peterson is quiet for a long time. “You can see how it’d go from there,” he finally says.

  “Yes,” I say. “I can take it from there.”

  Our parents had us when they were both in their forties and were, fo
r different reasons, too worn out and distracted to pay us much attention. Mother was a tiny, grim lady who rarely spoke above a whisper, and I cannot picture her upright without one hand pressed into the small of her back and her lips indrawn in showy stoicism. She had migraines and backaches, and slept a good deal of the time. Father slept a lot, too, though he was large, robust, and still handsome when we knew him. I realize now he was a manic depressive. Most of the time when he was not at work he lay on the living room couch with his face to the back cushion and his white-shirted arms tucked around his head, like a foxhole-soldier. Sometimes he would spend hours in the cellar banging out tarnished melodies and sour chords on our massive Mason & Hamlin upright—ragtime and barrelhouse, Mussorgsky and Liszt; or get us kids out of bed in the dead of night to go out for ice cream cones; or kneel on the back porch firing his .22 rifle at the woodpeckers who rattled on dead maples in the woods out back. His unpredictable eruptions never seemed to bother Mother. We never knew them to have a disagreement; they treated each other with faultless, vigilant courtesy. Before it became second nature for Julie and me to tiptoe, mute our songs and conversations, and work doors, windows, and drawers like professional burglars, we were continually, gently admonished to hush: Our father, or our mother, was sleeping.

  On some occasions—holidays, times of minor crisis—we carried on like an ordinary family, and every so often one or both would turn outward from their benign self-absorption and display a depth of concern for us which it did not occur to us to doubt. But by the time Julie and I were self-sufficient—when she was seven and I was nine—we were less a family than two congenial couples living by necessity in close quarters and making the best of it. We were used to them. They did not bother us, or interest us very much.

  When I was five I almost died of scarlet fever. For two months I lay alone in my attic room, visited and tended only by Mother, and my earliest memory of Julie is from the first day she was allowed to see me. She crawled up on the foot of my bed, sat down cross-legged, and welcomed me back with a gorgeous smile, so sudden and intense that it shook the bed. She was a fat, wide-nosed little kid with wispy white hair and bags under her eyes, and so beautiful in her love for me that I grabbed her under her chubby arms and pulled her against my chest, as I had seen Father do on his good days, and she lay still, heavy and warm, and I squeezed her and tasted her hair, and black spots swam in front of my eyes. From exertion, of course, but it was a fine moment and I knew it. I had discovered my sister, and myself. I was the one Julie loved.

  From then on she always came to me instead of Mother in the early morning, padding in and standing by the head of my bed until the sound and moist heat of her breath on my face woke me, and together we would go downstairs and turn on the kitchen light and fix our own breakfast. I taught her to work the toaster, and tie her shoes, and make letters. There wasn’t much talk at first—she chattered all the time, incomprehensibly—but we played many games, mostly of her devising. She was a bossy little kid. At one stage her favorite game was “Poppa,” which usually involved me curling up on cushions on the floor and asking her to bring me things. She brought me oranges, ashtrays, blocks, and damp washcloths for my forehead. “Are you comfortable?” she crooned. “Are you better now?” Throughout, I would have to keep my eyes closed, peeking only when she wasn’t looking, at the burgeoning mountain of medicine, and at her, waddling around the room drawing blinds and plumping pillows, one hand dug into what would eventually be the small of her back, muttering, “Oh, his poor head.” I was a little young to see the funny side of it, but I didn’t spoil it. She was different from me, and crazy, and I loved her.

  We fought like lovers too. When she was angry she clammed up, narrowed her eyes, and refused to look at me. She could keep this up for hours and it drove me wild. I hit her more than once, on the top of her platinum head with my fist, with all my strength, so hard that she sank to her knees; but she didn’t run upstairs to tell, any more than I would have if she had set my room on fire.

  We got our first taste of life on the outside when the Petersons moved next door, a loud, jovial family with five kids. We were invited there to play and found them odd. Mr. Peterson was always grabbing the kids or Mrs. Peterson in some fashion, hugging, roughhousing, slapping their bottoms; Mrs. Peterson, a terrible housekeeper, yelled, shrieked with laughter, and broke dishes on purpose; and the children, who seemed happy enough, were rude to one another and fought among themselves like wild dogs. “They’re silly,” was Julie’s conclusion, and I had to agree, but we went back from time to time, because we enjoyed the scandal, and they had electric trains.

  We were the odd ones, of course, as I discovered when I got to school and began to visit other homes. I was worried and ashamed, and kept it to myself, brooding, especially about Father; trying to understand, define, and place in some rational perspective just what was wrong with our family. This process was to go on throughout my adolescence, with great intensity and lavish melancholy, my nature being what it is. When Julie first came to school, my stomach was in a perpetual knot, from fear that the oddness I so carefully concealed would manifest itself for the whole world in my little sister. And sure enough; after one week her teacher came down the hall and called me out of class. Julie kept wandering off at recess, getting up and leaving her seat whenever she felt like it; Julie did not seem to understand that there were rules here; and would I please explain, since nobody else could get through to her. The teacher spoke gently, and looked amused—at us, I thought with horror, because we’re so strange.

  I badgered Julie all the way home. “Why don’t you do what the teacher says? You’re going to get in trouble. You have to do what they say.” I was practically wringing my hands.

  “Mrs. Holcomb is silly,” Julie said.

  “You have to wait for the bell,” I told her, close to tears. She was playing pretend hopscotch, with a dreamy look on her face. Hopscotch with no chalk lines. I thought, Oh God, and I grabbed her and pulled her still to face me. “You have to watch the other kids and do what they do. You have to stay until they say you can leave. This is very, very important.”

  She regarded me seriously. “When does it stop?”

  “Never.”

  I saw in her eyes that she believed me, but then she looked spacey again and smiled, with one side of her mouth, and started hopping up and down on one foot. “That’s silly,” she said. I pushed her down, viciously, into a pile of dirty leaves, and she did not speak to me for two days. But the teacher never complained to me again. Julie had decided to humor them.

  Not long after this she brought three little girls home with her. I watched from the living room window as they filed down the street, Julie in the lead. She briefed them when they got to the front porch. “You must take off your shoes. You must not make any loud noise, because our Mother is sleeping. Loud noises go through her like a knife. There’s cookies in the kitchen, and a big piano in the basement, but you can’t play it. We’re going in now. Just remember what I said.” I shut my eyes and slumped down on the couch, in a fever of embarrassment, while the silent troupe crept through the first floor and basement of our sad, sunless house. After a long while they came back upstairs. “This is my father’s rifle,” I heard her say. “You’ll have to leave when he comes home.” They entered the living room, where Julie disengaged herself and sat down beside me. “This is my brother, John,” she said. The three little girls, one fat and two skinny, blinked, smiled shyly at us, and waited, I could see, for some further dispensation. Finally one of them spoke up. “Julie said maybe you’d show us the chest of treasures.” And we did, Julie and I.

  We had toys of our own, but the chest of treasures was our prize, and the focus of our best games. It was a steamer trunk crammed with old things of Father’s, and Mother’s, and maybe our grandparents’ too: a cracked leather holster; a lavender veil; a tiny pair of lady’s boots, with silver eyelets; peacock feathers; pewter candlesticks; a horseshoe and a partial set of rusty iron quoits; t
he disembodied arm of an old Victrola. As Julie gravely removed each item and passed it around, with a brief description (“This is our pirate flag and pieces of eight”; “This is our magic lamp”), I saw them for the first time as they were, stripped of all those qualities we had imposed upon them between us. Our private world, the source of all our pleasure, would suffer humiliating and utter collapse in the light of ridicule, or a mere lack of enthusiasm. These people had seen horseshoes and old clothes before. So I watched, with amazement and pride, as the ceremony continued unchecked by a single giggle or skeptical yawn. They looked at an old candlestick and saw the magic lamp, and rubbed it, and could not have done otherwise in the face of my sister’s splendid, majestic self-possession.

  From then on she brought kids home with her whenever she felt like it. I was neither excluded nor expected to play with them. We were never jealous of each other’s friends. She played the queen with them but not with me, and we saw them off together and cleaned up their messes while we rehashed the events of the day. Company days usually went smoothly, although once in a great while someone would go away mad or crying. Julie was naturally generous, and by training considerate, but on those rare occasions when a visitor proved intransigent or dull, she would walk away without comment and disappear into the upper rooms until the offender left. Mother took the time once to scold her for this—I think the parent of a distraught child had called to complain—and Julie seemed genuinely sorry. But she didn’t change her ways, and she never lacked for friends.

  Just as it had taken a trio of outsiders to show me the shape and force of her personality, I didn’t realize she was pretty until my own friends started acting up around her. There was one, Charlie Metz, an awfully nice kid, beefy and easygoing, with a bad complexion, who would tense up and nod his head a lot, instead of talking, whenever she was with us. I thought for a long time he didn’t like her. Once she asked him to get something for her out of a high shelf in the kitchen. In his alacrity he ripped the cupboard door off its hinges. Julie fell down laughing. Another one, George Limberacus, my chess partner, I caught peering into her empty room when we walked by, with the keen and foolish look of a souvenir hunter.