logo

20 pages 40 minutes read

Beth Henley

Crimes of the Heart

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1982

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Act IIChapter Summaries & Analyses

Act II Summary

Later that evening, Barnette and Babe are in the kitchen. Barnette is going over stacks of papers and notes. Babe is telling him, for what is obviously not the first time, the story of shooting Zackery. She says that after it happened, she went into the kitchen and made lemonade. When she went to offer Zackery a glass, he asked her to call the hospital. During this conversation, Babe asks Barnette to call her Becky, which is her real name. However, she seems more concerned with keeping Willie Jay’s name out of things than with anything else.  

 

Lucille calls. Babe hands the phone to Barnette, saying that Lucille claims to have damning evidence that will result in Babe’s conviction. Barnette arranges to meet her at the hospital later that night to talk about it. Babe asks what Barnette’s vendetta against Zackery is about. He says that it’s a long story, but that Zackery ruined Barnette’s father. After he leaves, Babe begins putting her hair in curlers. Lenny enters and sits.  

 

Lenny is furious because she has learned that when Meg visits their sick grandfather in the hospital, she lies to him, telling him she’s got a record coming out, and that she’s got a role in a multi-million dollar film. Babe tells her not to be too hard on Meg, since Meg was the one who found their mother. Even though Lenny is tired of that being Meg’s excuse for misbehavior, she listens intently when Babe begins to tell her some things she never knew before.  

 

Babe tells Lenny that after Meg found their mother’s body, Meg began acting strangely. She would go to the library and obsessively study a book called Diseases of the Skin, looking at the most horrible pictures. She would also make herself look at a poster of crippled children (advertising for a charity) hanging in the window of the ice cream parlor, to prove that she wasn’t weak. Babe also reveals that most people in town blame Meg for what happened to Doc Porter’s leg: During a hurricane in which everyone else evacuated, Meg chose to stay, thinking it would be fun, and Doc Porter stayed with her. When the roof caved in, his leg was injured. It took him a year to recover, and Meg left him during that time, which made him so heartbroken that he never resumed his medical studies.  

 

Meg returns with a bottle of bourbon that she has already drunk some of. She admits to lying to their grandfather, but believes that her exciting stories give him something to live for. Meg hands Babe a newspaper. The article about Zackery’s shooting is on the front page. Babe pastes it into a scrapbook of unhappy events that she keeps. They flip through the book. There’s a picture of their father, smiling, and then a picture of their mother with a yellow cat. Babe says that if their mother hadn’t hung the cat with her, she wouldn’t have had such notoriety.  

 

They decide to play cards and are setting up when the phone rings. It’s Doc Porter. Meg says that he’s coming to see her. Babe and Lenny remind her that he’s married. Lenny confronts Meg about some candy and asks why she took a bite out of each one. Meg says that she just wanted to find one with nuts, then says that she knows she’s had too many men, but that it’s not her fault that Lenny’s jealous of her. Then Meg tells Lenny that she knows about Charlie, the man from the Lonely Hearts Club. Lenny is embarrassed that Meg knows, and furious at Babe for telling her.  

 

When Doc arrives, he and Meg sit alone. She tells him that she left him because she didn’t want to care. It scared her too much. Then she says that she had a mental breakdown and wound up in a sanitarium in Los Angeles. Doc invites her to take a walk and they leave with the bourbon. Babe comes downstairs in her slip and plays a few notes on her saxophone.  

 

Barnette knocks on the door and then comes inside. He has just come from the hospital. He says that Lucille, Zackery’s sister, was suspicious about Babe. She hired a private detective to take photos of her. He shows her a stack of photos of her and Willie Jay in her garage. Lenny comes down and says she just got a phone call. Their grandfather has had a stroke and is in the hospital.  

Act II Analysis

Act II reveals the depths of each character’s neuroses and challenges, aspects only hinted at in Act I.  

 

Meg is shown to be an insecure liar who is also possibly suffering from mental illness. The suggestion that she was fine before finding their mother’s body introduces a heartbreaking element to her life after that point. The girl who existed before her mother’s suicide would never have spent time compulsively looking at pictures of skin disease or have needed to convince herself that she wasn’t weak. These are also clues that may illuminate her reputation for promiscuity, her need to lie to her Granddaddy about how exciting and rich her life is, and her impulsive flight from Doc Porter, who loved her. Meg’s self-worth is near zero, despite her vivacity.  

 

Lenny’s Act II drama centers on the revelation that she has only been with one man, or potentially, only on one date. It is poignant that her only romantic experience has been with Charlie, and that she broke it off because of worries that were not even real. One of the more sophisticated elements of Crimes of the Heart is how deftly it shows the differing dimensions of loneliness. Lenny is lonely in a way that Meg is not, and Babe’s loneliness, too, is separate from theirs.  

 

In some ways, Babe seems more levelheaded than the other two, until the reader remembers that she shot her husband. She commits the only act of violence in the play, therefore putting her sanity in the starkest doubt. She is lonely because she feels helpless, and as if understanding is beyond her grasp. She can’t be entirely sure of her reasons for shooting Zackery, and she is more worried about Willie Jay’s status than her own, because she can value his life more than her own.  

 

By the end of Act II, each main character has been placed at her breaking point, setting up an almost unbearable amount of tension for the beginning of Act III. It is also noteworthy that, despite the thematic grimness of Act II, the humor is as sharp and pointed as ever.  

blurred text
blurred text
blurred text
blurred text