The Pure in Heart

By Linda Larson

When Laura saw God she was sitting in her rented house trailer on the couch thinking about murdering Glory Zulawski. She didn’t want Glory to suffer any pain; she just wanted her eliminated from the scheme of the universe.

Tony Abruzzo, the man Laura had expected to be hers and to whom she had given the use of her house and car for a year and a half to overcome his heroine addiction—she was also able to get him a job in the ardently patriotic town of Jackson, Mississippi because he was a Vietnam Era veteran—had decided Glory was the woman for him.

Tony told a joke in those days that Laura suspected her father who died just before she saw God, told him, which made her shudder at first and later seemed like the story of her life.

A young man has a blind date. He goes to a nice wooden house with a white picket fence to pick her up and it turns out she has no arms or legs. Her father is a hulking brute of a man who gives the young man a lecture on bringing the daughter home safe and sound and treating her “like a gentleman.”

The young man carries the girl out to his car and the first thing she says to him is “Let’s do it and have some fun.”

“How?” says the young man. “You have no arms or legs.”

There’s a rope swing out in the woods,” she says. “Just set me in it and we can have a good time.”

They drive out to the woods and he helps her into the swing and they have sex for a long time in the swing. It’s getting pretty late and the young man is afraid of her father so he anxiously helps her get back into her dress, puts her in the car and drives her home. She is looking pretty disheveled when they get back to her house and the young man hopes the father will be asleep.

The father is waiting on the porch for them, bigger and meaner looking than before. The young man picks the girl up in his arms and carries her up to the porch. The father says to him, “I like you, young man.”

“Thank you, Sir. But why?” asks the young man.

“You brought her home like a gentleman,” the father says. “The rest of the boys she goes out with just leave her in the swing.”

Laura’s plan for murdering Glory Zulawski was to do it painlessly. First Laura would furnish a walk-in freezer with a sofa, blankets, a battery-operated radio and a skylight so that Glory wouldn’t have to die in the dark. Then she would lock Glory into it around five in the morning and give her twenty-four hours to freeze solid. Laura had heard that freezing to death is painless.

Tony Abruzzo was Laura’s dream. First of all, he was Italian. Laura loved to eat and Tony was always cooking up some Italian delicacy in Neapolitan red sauce. Not only that, when he got off the bus (loaded on heroin for the trip) he brought with him a radio, actually, a boom box.

Laura had a handicap. She couldn’t understand the words to rock and roll songs. While the rest of her generation had been busy “getting high with a little help from their friends.” Laura had immersed herself in the newspapers. As a result she had spent most of her young life alarmed and exhausted. Tony found the blues station for her, the Jackson State University station, and a whole new world opened up for Laura.

She started buying cassettes of the blues and Tony would sing along and dance to every tune. He knew them all, even though Laura was the one who had lived her entire life in the home of the blues. Tony loved the music so much Laura loved him.

Their favorite blues musician that was still alive and kicking was Albert King. His lyrics they could both relate to…“Chump change, that’s all I ever get. Chump change is all that I have left. I have to pay the light bill. I have to pay the phone bill, too. I have to pay child support. Know what I have left after I pay all that? Two quarters, two dimes, one nickel and some pennies. Know what they call that? Chump change. Ain’t got no money-o.”

And Albert King sang on about his troubles as if he didn’t have a care in the world. As if no one could make him care that life was so difficult, he was going to love life anyway, on any terms.

Tony was a godsend for lots of reasons. When he came to live with Laura in Jackson, Mississippi, from the Bronx to get away from heroin, he realized she was pregnant about two weeks after he arrived. She had no idea she was pregnant, but he sensed it. It wasn’t his baby.

The baby was the child of a White Russian named Sergei Komarovsky. He was working as a waiter at a fancy Jackson restaurant and one reason Laura went to bed with him was that he was wearing a tuxedo on that fateful night when he called her for a ride home from work. The other reason was that she had read everything Russian that was in translation that she could get her hands on. She was really smitten with the Russian people.

Sergei was a lover of Glory Zulawski’s too. Laura was living in Glory’s basement. Glory let Laura live there for twenty-five dollars a month because her eldest son had left home for the Marines and she was lonely. She was a painter. She painted big, wonderful, gaudy flowers in pots, and cockatoos. Mostly, she painted potted plants and she made them as seductive as a potted plant can be.

Glory was in the throes of getting a divorce from her husband when Laura found out she was pregnant. Mr. Zulawski was Polish and he and Sergei Komarovsky were buddies and then Glory started to have this affair with Sergei. Sergei got everyone pregnant. He got Glory pregnant but her husband made her have an abortion. He got a midwife pregnant and Laura pregnant, all in the same spring.

There was only one reason Laura didn’t get an abortion even though Tony and her mother were for it. She and her father had gone fishing in one of her Dad’s catfish ponds years before. Laura never caught a fish; she only caught turtles. But her father had caught a fine big whiskery fish. To clean it he drove a nail through its lips into a tree. Then he took his catfish skinner and pulled the silvery, shiny skin off the fish as it hung there on the tree bark flapping. Then he took his pocketknife and slit it open to remove the guts. Inside the silvery, done-for fish was a cluster of brilliant ruby-red eggs. Laura’s father held them in his hand for a moment and swore under his breath before throwing them down in the rust-colored dirt.

Laura never told anyone why she didn’t have an abortion. But after she found out she was pregnant she started to go to the Catholic Church for safety. Father Noonan said all human life was sacred and that Laura was supposed to love everybody. That Jesus’ only request was that one “love one’s neighbor as oneself.”

In the meantime, Tony was handsome and brooding and had eyes like ‘Cotton-Eyed Joe.’ He had discovered that alcohol was the next best thing to heroin and soon found more excitement in Glory’s big house upstairs than in Laura’s basement room singing the blues to her fevered heart. Glory could really hold her liquor.

One night Tony took Glory and Laura to see Albert King at a nightclub. They got there early and Glory and Tony drank a lot. They had brought their own bottle and paid for “set –ups” which were glasses of Coca-Cola and ice to go with their 151 rum.

Laura was hugely pregnant but Tony danced with her anyway. Albert King was round and big and black and sweaty. They requested a song Laura thought of as the ice cream song…”I want to be your personal manager, Babe. I want to do everything I can for you. I want to be right by your side when all your so-called friends are through. I want to be your milkman in the morning, Babe, and your ice-cream man when the day is through.”

Albert King saw her dancing with Tony and said from the bandstand, “That’s going to be one dancing baby.”

Being pregnant was rigorous. Laura didn’t want to eat anything but potato chips and Coca-Cola, so she drank a gallon of milk a day and that’s how Ethel came into this world. Without the milk, baby Ethel wouldn’t have made it.

She weighed five pounds, was born two months premature, and looked like an angel prizefighter from a brutal forceps delivery by a rank amateur who didn’t know any better. Laura wasn’t a paying patient, so that’s what she got.

Ethel was beautiful to Laura and Tony and Glory. Tony came into the nursery where she lay in a little clear plastic incubator and swept the little one into his arms, baptizing her with a solemn and reverent kiss. Laura wished Ethel was Tony’s baby because she thought that if she had been his daughter no one would have ever dared to hurt her. But Ethel wasn’t Tony’s daughter and she got hurt from the first.

There was Laura in the little basement room with no money and no help and no companions except for Glory Zulawski and Tony, who by this time were madly in love. Glory would sit around saying helpful things to Laura like Laura should be happy to have Tony’s friendship. All three of them would get wildly excited whenever Ethel did anything at all. A poop was cause for celebration. At night when Laura and Ethel were alone, Ethel would lie on Laura’s chest in the big bed and make sucking sounds as she went to sleep.

But Tony and Glory were there less and less of the time, and left to her own devices Laura got very confused. She hung bed sheets over her windows because she thought there were CIA snipers living next door and they would shoot Ethel through the window. Pretty soon the people that come and take you away came and took Laura away. Before she knew what happened, Ethel was being cared for by Catholic Charities. Laura didn’t trust herself to give Ethel a decent chance at life, so she did what the courts call ‘surrender’ her formally for adoption.

They changed her name to Beth Ann.

Laura was pretty angry at having had this baby for some rich people to enjoy. She was pretty confused at the time. Now that she has become a drug addict living in the Bronx she is glad she did it. Anyway, it was the best thing she could do. She couldn’t even be together enough this year, now that Beth Ann is nine, to send her a birthday present.

Laura was very attached to Tony. He had supervised her labor and delivery, giving instructions to the novice doctor as to how much Demerol he should administer. Laura couldn’t imagine life without Tony. Neither could she imagine a life playing second fiddle to her archenemy, Glory Zulawski. The next thing that happened was that Laura’s dad was diagnosed as having lung cancer. He was given about nine months to live.

At the same time, Laura was hired to teach seventh and eighth grade at Pearl Bailey Jr. High School in Jackson, Mississippi. It was very touching and fit in with all her stereotypes about being a black junior high student in the Deep South. The most praised and probably most competent English teacher was white, and in the teacher’s lounge where she and Laura ducked in for cigarettes ten times a day she would casually refer to her students as ‘those chimps.’

Laura’s students were beautiful to look at and be around. They were more innocent than angry. One of them wore a silver glove and wanted to be like Michael Jackson. All the little girls were in love with him and Laura could see why. She asked Tony about Michael Jackson and what it meant. He said, “Maybe Michael Jackson is just for fun, Laura.” Tony was usually on the money when he had an opinion about something.

For example, he loved the Marathon Man, the movie starring Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier. One night Laura and Tony watched it together on cable in the house trailer where they had moved after Glory’s husband sold the house pending the Zulawski’s divorce.

Glory had twenty-three thousand dollars from her settlement and Laura knew she was going to have trouble competing with that. It would have helped if Laura had a sunny and pleasant personality, but she didn’t. Laura was more beautiful to look at than Glory, but not twenty-three thousand dollars worth.

Anyway, Tony and Laura had never made love even though they slept in the same bed for a year. The reason was that Laura wasn’t too excited about sex. She was thirty-seven years old and had never had an orgasm. She loved being hugged and kissed, especially hugged, but other than that she was unreachable.

The night they watched the Marathon Man, Tony kept her riveted to the movie with his exclamations about Nazis and anti-Semites. It turned out he was against them but Laura couldn’t tell from his sarcastic comments at first which side he was on. She hated racism and anti-Semitism and always had since she was in the sixth grade. A black sixth-grader named Butch Foster slapped her in the face when she asked him what a n------ was. Laura felt that she had injured him more than he injured her. Laura thought the people who were prejudiced against groups of people had a handicap more serious than hers and were to be pitied.

After the Marathon Man was over, Tony made love to her. She wanted him to because she thought it would win his love and that he would abandon Glory for her. That didn’t happen. What did happen was that he was very persistent and kept making love to her a long time after every other man would have had his orgasm and gone home. He just kept on and on and it didn’t hurt and he didn’t tire Laura out, but he just wouldn’t quit. Then all of a sudden he had her full attention for a few minutes and she had her first orgasm.

It was bliss. So, as well as the blues, and the Demerol and all the attention and the meatballs in red sauce, Tony introduced Laura to her own sexuality. Except she hasn’t made love with anyone or had an orgasm since. Because sure enough he left her for Glory Zulawski and Laura’s father died and there she was sitting on the sofa in the rented trailer where Tony had made love to her once, fiercely and everlastingly, thinking these murderous thoughts about Glory Zulawski.

She thought about a lot of things as she lay there. Of how the visiting nurse had brought over a packet filled with needles pre-loaded with morphine the night Dad died. She told Laura and her mother that the morphine might kill him sooner, but that at any rate he wouldn’t last the night. The nurse told Laura about pinching the skin so the needle wouldn’t hit the bone and cause Dad any pain.

Laura had been lying on the twin bed next to her dad, sleeping, when her mother came in the room and told her that he must be suffering terribly from the sound of his gasping breaths. Her mother injected the morphine into the calf of his leg while Laura pinched the skin. Then her mother went back to bed and Laura sat there gazing at him and dozed off. When she awoke a few minutes later, her dad wasn’t breathing any more. That was the first time that Laura shot dope. Afterwards, she woke her mother and they called Wright and Ferguson to come get the body.

Thinking about murdering Glory was how Laura put herself to sleep at night. A delicious hot bath and then to lie there in the dark thinking about Glory packed in snow except for her nose peeping out, freezing to death painlessly.

This was the afternoon though, and Laura’s Dad’s funeral was over but she wasn’t over him being gone. And Tony was gone, too. And Ethel was gone and it was like she had never been born. And Laura was lying there musing on the image of Glory packed in snow and Laura thought she had better uncover Glory’s mouth, too, in case her nose got stuffed up and she suffocated by accident which would be frightening and painful. Laura’s eyes were closed and she was lying on the couch with a blanket over her even though it was over a hundred degrees outside. She had the central air on in the trailer so she could be covered up and feel warm and safe under a light blanket.

All of a sudden, she saw Jesus looking at her. He was younger than Laura, but not by much. He had long brown hair and he was dead. He was lying in a shallow grave and had turned the color of moss. And his eyes were open and he was looking right at Laura and he looked very sad. That was how he looked, very said and disappointed. She was startled to see him and tried to shake herself awake but she was already awake. Laura looked back at him knowing that even though he was so sad and disappointed at what she was doing with her life at that moment that this was probably as good as her life was ever going to get to have him notice her at all…she looked at him. Then he was gone.

She remembered reading something in the New Testament, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” She still to this day wonders if seeing God and Jesus are the same thing and if she is pure in heart. But Jesus never appeared to her again.

They are all gone. Ethel is gone. Dad is gone. Tony is gone. Even Glory Zulawski-Abruzzo is gone from Laura’s life.

Laura knows her father couldn’t have told Tony that joke. Her father had spent his life tending the weak and the helpless. He did it by putting plumbing and flooring in dirt floor shacks. Or by fixing people’s cars. Or by filling up freezers with peas and pork for the winter. Or by going to funerals in black churches and enduring an emotional outpouring which he hated in order to show his respect for an individual who had been a friend.

Laura’s father would never have told a story, which would have been cruel about his daughter. But he might have told it on himself.

Laura didn’t really become a drug addict living in the Bronx. She became a drug addict living in Boston. After Tony and Glory got married, Laura decided to leave Jackson, her lifelong home. She sold her car for a thousand dollars and packed two suitcases and got on the Amtrak to Boston.

Now she is waiting to get a phone call from someone who will rescue her like she rescued Tony. She thinks Tony paid her back though for her help. He gave her someone to love for a time and introduced her to the blues. She doesn’t think anyone will call her up like she did Tony and say, “Laura, you can stop living in hallways now and come to my house and there is no heroin here and I will get you a job and you will be safe.” So now she knows how much she really did for Tony, which makes her happy. After all, doing anything to help anyone counts as loving your neighbor.

In Boston, Laura has learned how wet the world is with human kindness. There is a red-haired girl named Elaine that brings Laura a sandwich every day at noon and wants to take her to AA. As she sits in her doorway writing in her notebook each afternoon, people stop and give her handfuls of change and sometimes dollar bills. Even the dope man tells her she’s got to stop using his product and take better care of herself.

Laura forgives Glory in her heart and tries to write poems that sound like the blues. She knows if she tries hard enough her life will change again, like it has changed before. In the meantime she waits, dangling in the swing.