Penny Ann Drinkwater

Penny Ann Drinkwater is remembered first through Dominick Birdsey’s childhood account of a girl he treated as an outsider, and later through the murder that permanently altered her twin brother, Ralph Drinkwater. A student at River Street School, she is also connected to Dominick and Thomas Birdsey through a family relationship that Dominick only understands years afterward. Her story links a small act of schoolyard deception to a lasting burden of grief and to the novel’s larger concern with how prejudice and family secrets distort what people believe they know about one another.

Identity and School Years

Penny Ann and Ralph were the only other twins at River Street School besides Dominick and Thomas. The Drinkwaters were a year older than the Birdsey twins, and Penny Ann had repeated a grade; although she should have been in fourth grade with Ralph, she sat next to Dominick. Their schoolmates classified the Drinkwaters as Black, but Dominick later recognizes that they were of mixed Black, white, and Wequonnoc ancestry. The children were thus treated as a pair of twins while also being divided from the white Birdsey brothers by racial assumptions that Dominick did not question at the time.

Dominick’s early recollections show how casually exclusion became part of school life. He describes Penny Ann as poorly groomed and disruptive, and remembers other children treating her as someone to avoid. He disliked her rather than asking what lay behind her behavior. Later, he recognizes that she had been hungry: the food she took was not evidence of the dishonesty he attributed to her, but a sign of deprivation. That recognition does not erase the way he saw her as a child; it makes the limitations of that view part of her story.

The Lie and Its Consequences

One day, after Penny Ann was blamed for taking food, Dominick accused her of lying. He then invented a claim of his own: he told Miss Higgins that Penny Ann had stolen Oreos and boasted about it. Miss Higgins reported the supposed theft to Principal Miss Haas, who believed Dominick and dismissed Penny Ann’s denials. The accusation brought Dominick praise as a good citizen, and the teacher wrote that judgment on the board. He felt both pleased by the approval and uneasy, while sensing Thomas watching him from across the room.

The event matters not because Dominick’s lie directly caused Penny Ann’s later murder, which the evidence does not establish, but because it exposes the unequal credibility the children were granted. Dominick knew the accusation was fabricated and expected adults to believe him rather than Penny Ann. At the time he rationalized his act by deciding she must have stolen from someone on another occasion. In retrospect, he understands that this excuse helped him keep the public praise while evading what he had done. His memory of her becomes inseparable from his recognition that he participated in a small, ordinary injustice and was rewarded for it.

Disappearance and Death

Penny Ann disappeared during a snowstorm. For roughly a week, her photograph appeared in the newspaper, first prominently and then less often. At school, her vacant seat and the belongings left in her desk made her absence tangible; her blue sweater remained stuffed there, one sleeve hanging down. Dominick asked to move seats, but Miss Higgins refused. The account places the children’s daily routine beside a disappearance that they cannot resolve, as the empty desk remains when the news coverage begins to fade.

Her photograph later returned to the front page with the report that a girl’s body had been found at The Falls. The newspaper said that she had been killed and that her clothing had been removed. Dominick remembers trying to make sense of what he read against the February snow, asking himself whether the cold had been part of what her killer intended. The account conveys the child’s fear and confusion without giving him an understanding of the crime. Penny Ann’s murder becomes a public fact, but its meaning remains beyond the boy who had known her mainly as the girl seated beside him.

Her grave preserves only a starkly abbreviated record. At the Indian cemetery, her marker is small, bearing the initials P.A.D. and the dates 1948–1958. Dominick contrasts it with the larger memorial for Ralph’s cousin Lonnie, which bears a fuller inscription. The difference in scale and wording makes Penny Ann’s memorial another image of how little room the community gives her: she is present in the cemetery, but represented by initials and dates rather than an account of her life.

Ralph’s Grief and Dominick’s Recognition

The cemetery where Penny Ann was buried was also the place where her body had been found. Years later, Dominick works on a maintenance crew that mows the town graveyards, and he gradually understands why Ralph becomes withdrawn there. What Dominick had initially taken for ordinary sullenness was connected to the repeated necessity of tending the site of his sister’s grave and the place associated with her murder. The crew’s routine makes the location familiar to the workers, but it cannot make it emotionally neutral for Ralph.

That history becomes especially immediate when the crew goes to The Falls in the summer of 1969. Signs warning people away and chain-link fencing had been installed after Penny Ann’s murder, but the barriers were rusted and damaged, and children had made a way down to the water. Ralph follows Dominick and Leo there. When Leo speaks carelessly about the place, Dominick reacts by striking him and explaining that Ralph’s sister died there. The reaction is an important reversal: Dominick, who had once dismissed Penny Ann and lied about her, now recognizes that the site cannot be treated as an amusing or ordinary swimming spot. Ralph climbs onto a tree limb and rocks it; for a moment, Dominick fears that Ralph may be about to die. Ralph then climbs back down. The episode makes the danger of the place and the force of Ralph’s grief visible without turning his grief into a simple explanation for his actions.

Dominick later acknowledges the deeper guilt behind his change in perspective. He recalls that Ralph had been treated as an outsider and that Penny Ann had been hungry, while Dominick’s invented accusation had been accepted as truth. He also recognizes that he had collected pennies in her name and participated in a public memorial for her while leaving his own lie unacknowledged. In his retrospective account, remembering her is not enough to undo the harm; it exposes the distance between public gestures of sympathy and private responsibility.

Family Connection and Narrative Significance

Long after Penny Ann’s death, Thomas stops beside her grave and asks Dominick whether he remembers her. He identifies Ralph as her brother and says that Ralph had helped get Thomas out of danger. Dominick’s memories of the grave and of Penny Ann’s body falling over The Falls return alongside the more recent crisis. At this point, he does not yet understand the full significance of Thomas’s question. He recalls that Thomas had once said they were cousins, but had dismissed the claim as one of his brother’s delusions.

Ralph later explains that he and Penny Ann had hated being lumped together with Dominick and Thomas as another pair of twins, with the white boys implicitly treated as better. He also recalls his anger at Dominick’s speech at the tree-planting ceremony for Penny Ann: Ralph had thought Dominick was denying their shared ancestry. Thomas, Ralph says, had spoken with him about their kinship during the work-crew summer and said that their mother had told him. Dominick initially insists that she would not have told Thomas and withheld the truth from him, then remembers Thomas pointing to Penny Ann’s grave and declaring that they were cousins. What he had taken for delusional talk becomes evidence that Thomas knew something about their family history that Dominick did not.

Penny Ann therefore occupies two connected places in the novel’s memory: she is the child Dominick wronged and the dead relative whose grave helps reveal the concealed bonds between the Birdsey and Drinkwater families. Her story is filtered through Dominick’s imperfect recollection, so its significance changes as his understanding changes. The child he once judged becomes a person whose hunger, exclusion, death, and family ties expose the limits of his youthful certainty. Through Penny Ann, the novel binds private guilt to public prejudice and makes a neglected grave the point at which a suppressed family relationship returns to view.